There are several awesome and feature-rich frameworks out there for building mobile web apps which can handle almost any scenario.

For complicated apps, they are usually the best option to go with. However, if you are building a simpler app that requires the most standard UI features, Zoey can be for you.

It is a HTML5-CSS3-powered framework for creating mobile apps, built on top of Zepto.js and weights only 6kb (gzipped).

Zoey has the UI components like navigation, lists, buttons, control groups, forms and grids.

The framework is compatible with iOS + Android and comes with an app skeleton that covers all the features.

iUI is a mobile web framework that has been around for a long time (since 2007) compared to many other mobile resources.

It was mentioned in a previous WRD article (iPhone Application And Website Development: All Tools And Tutorials You Need) and evolved much since then.

The framework includes a JavaScript library, CSS and images for developing touch-enabled web apps.

User interfaces to be created are iPhone-like yet compatible with most smartphones and tablets and has support for menus, forms, lists, image galleries and more.

Also, there are built-in extensions for caching, getting system information, HTML5 videos or theme switching.

iUI is well-documented and has tutorials to get you started easily.

appMobi, a popular platform for creating HTML5-powered mobile apps and websites has recently open sourced several useful resources for mobile developers.

JavaScript Bridge API

In order to access the device APIs of iOS and Android, creating native apps is not a must. The JavaScript Bridge API brings this functionality to mobile web apps.

The API has support for accessing the camera, notifications, player, display, geolocation and more.

aUX.js

This is a mobile web framework for quickly creating touch-enabled interfaces that run equally good on iOS and Android.

It has on-device caching, offers block-based architecture rather than page based (only necessary block are updated during browsing), supports fixed headers/footers and includes several workarounds for known bugs on mobile web development.

Others

appMobi has also open sourced mobiUs, a mobile browser that offers a native-like experience when browsing web apps.

It enables web apps to access all of the hardware features of a smartphone, has a good game performance with DirectCanvas technology, comes with built-in caching and much more.

And, there is Direct Canvas/Box2D/Sound which helps running web apps (mostly games that require calculations) much faster, play multiple audio files at the same time (HTML5 normally supports 1 at a time), etc.

Many designers/developers were excited to see the launch of the jQuery Mobile ~a year ago and waited for the stable release to start building for mobile.

With an announcement yesterday, the project officially reached to its first stable release.

jQuery Mobile already supports a huge set of mobile browsers, has the ThemeRoller for mobile and it is very well-documented with guides + examples for an easy start.

The framework includes many widgets for (touch-optimized) mobile layouts: toolbars, buttons, pages/dialogs, content formatting, list views and forms. All built on jQuery core for a familiar and consistent syntax.

It is always good to know the cons and pros of tools we are using before starting a new project with them in order not to be disappointed later on.

A frequently-updated chart by Markus Falk does this for the mobile frameworks as there is a detailed comparison of their capabilities.

The chart displays the rendering engines supported, target platform, hardware, development languages, UI features and license for each framework.

Also, if you already have strict requirements for the project, a wizard helps filtering the frameworks and fastens the process of choosing the right one.

MobileESP is an open source project for easily detecting users browsing the web pages with a mobile browser.

It has server-side versions for PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Ruby and a client-side JavaScript version with light features.

There are methods provided for detecting a specific device (iPhone, Android, WebOS, etc.) or a wider selection if it is a smartphone, tablet, game console, etc.

The project has support for most of the well-known devices and can even identify their capabilities.

Touchy Boilerplate is a starting kit for creating mobile web apps that covers most of the tricky parts of the development process.

It includes an HTML template with all the mobile-related meta tags, various browsing scenarios like animated navigation, fixed header + scrollable content and deep linking support.

Also, there are Geolocation functions and various other UI elements provided.

The boilerplate uses jQuery or Zepto.js and has 2 other optional helpers: Touchy JS and Touchy PHP which handles most of the exciting stuff mentioned above.

Mobiscroll is a "wheel scroller user control" optimized for touchscreens to easily enter date and/or time which comes as a jQuery plugin.

It is highly customizable where values can be anything (including images) and can even be used as an alternative to the default select control (dropdown list).

The plugin's look can be changed easily with theming support and has ready-to-use good-looking skins (default, Android, Sense UI and iOS).

And, it integrates well with other JS frameworks including jQuery Mobile.

mAdserve is an open source and PHP-MySQL-powered ad server application for managing + tracking mobile ads easily.

It helps controlling directly-sold, cross-promotional and ad-network ads (many of the networks are supported by default) from a single interface.

There is no need to deal with SDKs of each ad network and, if you are selling the ads directly, it automates the process by enabling the customers to sign-up and purchase ads themselves (with PayPal or credit cards).

mAdserve supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 apps + mobile websites and campaigns can be targeted by device besides country/city, handset capabilities and schedule.

It includes open source and lightweight advertising SDKs for the devices mentioned and code snippets for mobile websites.

And, ads/campaigns can be tracked with live reports and a reporting API that helps gathering this data.

Joshfire is an open source framework for developing web applications that can work in multiple devices.

It only uses HTML5 + JavaScript and web apps can be built to be compatible with browsers, desktops, smart phones, smartTVs and connected objects.

The content, design and data is separated for a flexible development process and the framework makes use of many popular resources like MediaElement.js or Zepto.js.

Currently, supported devices are desktop browsers, iOS, Android, GoogleTV, SamsungTV and there is an adapter for Node.js as well.

Applications can be controlled with keyboard, mouse, touch, tv-remote and more depending on the capabilities of the device.

The library is improved continuously, documented in detail and comes with various examples.