I have already talked about Appcelerator's Titanium in a previous article. One of the things that I found extremely hard to accomplish is downloading very big files with it. Using Titanium.Network.HTTPClient blocks the user interface and makes the application seem "hang" while the download is in progress. So, how can you download big files in Titanium without causing the whole application to freeze? The solution is easy; just use Web Workers!

Maybe you have already tried Appcelerator’s Titanium. If not, you should have. It’s a very easy to use RAD framework for creating cross-platform desktop and mobile applications based on HTML, Javascript, PHP, Python and Ruby. However, I was having a grave issue lately with their desktop builds. No matter what, I could not build the Windows installation package of my applications. Appcelerator’s documentation on manually packaging applications is sketchy and outdated. So I did what any self-respecting hacker (in the good sense, i.e. geeky developer with a strong aspiration to solving complex problems) would. I figured out a solution myself and documented everything in the process.