An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/creating-mobile-app-famo-us-manifold-js/, by @DavidV
This article is part of a web dev tech series from Microsoft. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
For the last few months I’ve been wanting to dive into this new JavaScript framework since I saw their launch event in October of 2014. Famo.us includes an open source 3D layout engine fully integrated with a 3D physics animation engine that can render to DOM, Canvas, or WebGL In short, you can get native performance out of a web application, largely due to the way Famo.us handles the rendering of its content.
Jenn Simmons of the Web Platform podcast recently had Famou.us CEO, Steve Newcomb on the podcast to discuss the mobile performance and their upcoming mixed mode. This was perfect timing, as Microsoft had just released ManifoldJS, a tool which allows you to package your web experience as native apps across Android, iOS, and Windows. I wanted to put these two technologies to the test.
In short, I wanted to determine if Famo.us does actually have great mobile performance, as well as have an understanding of how straightforward the process was for packaging my web application as mobile app.
What Problem Do These Two Things Solve?
The web isn’t necessarily known for creating high-performance applications, which is a shame because it truly is capable of blazing fast interactive apps, but sadly has been plagued by the DOM. With technologies like the HTML5 canvas, WebGL, and asm.js, the browser really can be a playground for cutting edge interactivity. Famo.us aims to solve this getting around the bottleneck for most web applications, which is the DOM, and utilizing WebGL and abstracting your work from the DOM. More on this later.