When comparing jQuery Mobile vs Telerik AppBuilder, the Slant community recommends jQuery Mobile for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?” jQuery Mobile is ranked 13th while Telerik AppBuilder is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose jQuery Mobile is:
With HTML5 development being relatively amateur jQuery Mobile has a vast selection of resources to assist. These resources include websites, books, apps and other frameworks, 3rd party plugins and extensions, and more. All of these can help ramp up and excel the project development cycle.
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Pros
Pro Resources
With HTML5 development being relatively amateur jQuery Mobile has a vast selection of resources to assist. These resources include websites, books, apps and other frameworks, 3rd party plugins and extensions, and more. All of these can help ramp up and excel the project development cycle.
Pro ThemeRoller
An interactive tool that has been created to customize an apps theme. Users can import a current theme, make changes, and export the theme back to the app for integration.
Pro Download Builder
To optimize application development jQuery Mobile provides a tool to allow the user to customize the framework. It contains the ability to pick and choose which modules to include and then bundles the framework so it contains only what is needed.
Pro Plugins for popular IDEs
Telerik provides Visual Studio and Sublime Text plugins for the AppBuilder.
Pro Integrates with Apache Cordova
AppBuilder offers a fast way to import Cordova plugins such as the camera.
Cons
Con The project is practically abandoned
The last release was in 2014. Samsung Tizen Advanced UI (TAU), for example, was started with JQuery, but it was forked off and completely rebuilt from scratch with jQuery concepts but without JQuery dependency itself.
Con Clunky and slow
Con No MVC support
There is no included MVC support in jQuery Mobile. It is possible to achieve this, however, using other frameworks such as BackboneJS in combination with jQuery Mobile, but there are a few limitations. Specifically that MVC frameworks, such as BackboneJS or KnockoutJS, are not compatible with jQuery Mobile page routing.
Con Young project with a small community
AppBuilder is a young project that's been fairly slow to gain popularity. This means the community is rather small, so there is a limited amount of 3rd party learning resources available.
There is a forum, but it's not very active.