Appcelerator ties on cloudy back-end for Titanium devs

Appcelerator has updated its Titanium mobile developer platform to add scalable cloud service integration to the back-end of applications following its acquisition of Cocoafish in February.

Titanium 2.0 uses Appcelerator Cloud Services to access 15 basic functions, ranging from user management and push notification, to popular functions like photo sharing and ratings systems. Apps can be built with Objective-C, Java and HTML5, or any other third-party publishing platform.

"We've always focused on applications published on client side, and now we're adding a turnkey solution on the back end as well," Joanne Buckner, VP of product management at Appcelerator told The Register. "This also marks an entry into a broader range of applications."

The Titanium app build is available as a freemium model, with a basic service with 5GB or storage and 1,250,000 push and email notifications a month gratis. Paid plans get Appcelerator Enterprise Extensions, up to 30GB of storage and enhanced bandwidth and support.

The platform has SDKs for iOS, Android, JavaScript and REST, and Buckner said that something similar for the Windows Phone mobile platform was in the pipeline. The bulk of its developers are working on Apple's platform at the moment however, according to a survey released in February, behind Android and Windows.

To promote the launch, the company is also offering five prizes of $1,000 apiece for what it considers the coolest Titanium app, plus "something special" as an extra prize. Entries can be an existing application ported to the new system or something new, with a deadline for submissions on June 1. ®