Yes, you can convert a Sencha Touch app to native. You have to use PhoneGap, or Nimblekit to do so. You can also write your own native wrappers - it s not very hard on iPhone, but more of a challenge on Android. We don t have a tutorial on this yet, but the phonegap guys have done this with at least one sencha app that they built. [I work for sencha]

Update: Here is a crazily detailed tutorial on using PhoneGap with Sencha

In principle yes. You could write some kind of a wrapper application. This application would have an ‘UIWebView‘ as the main view which is then used to browse the web. This would allow you to keep your HTML5-based app and wrap it in a native objective-c app.

If you want to write a "real" native app your would have to switch languages from HTML5, CSS and JS to Objective-C, which is really different.

So here is a question for the Sencha guys here, is there other documentation for Sencha Touch available beyond the API reference and sample apps on your site?

We are currently trying to switch a prototype application from JQTouch to Sencha, but are finding it challenging to get going with Sencha Touch; while there is a lot of documentation it doesn t seem to be the right documentation.

A really simple solution would be to make the API reference online allow comments so as we and others figure out how to use Sencha touch we could provide comments (look at php.net s manual to see how this worked for them.)

While I don t know exactly how Sencha works, if you just want to be able to take advantage of the multitouch features of the iDevices in a native application, this is very well documented in Apple s portal, including sample code; and even third party resources which you can find by using google.

In iOS 3.2 and higher, Apple has made handling touch events easier with introducing gesture recognizers, and they re simply wonderful to use.

Have a look over these resources, http://developer.apple.com/iphone will get you started. There are links to videos, text resources, and sample code as I mention that will give you a solid foundation to do what you need to.

Why would you want to convert? If you are writing successful apps with Sencha then stay with it. There are advantages to web based apps.

• You can build them in a more accessible toolkit html/css/javascript.
• You can deploy them more easily and quickly by setting them up on a web server.
• You can update them on the fly etc.

If you produce a "native" app then you need to register with and pay for the Apple dev programme and the process for submitting an app is quite laborious and of course it might get rejected.

Apple themselves use the web based applications route, look up AdLib and PastryKit here on Stackoverflow. THese two libraries are Apples version of Sencha.

There are of course advantages to writing native apps. They have a very rich development set of tools and (in my opinion) will always function better then most web based apps and there is the marketing machine of the app store you can plug into.

But you can successfully go either way.