mobile / web application for confrence text / photo messaging - html

Imagine a social network application similar to twitter which every user is following and is also followed by some other users and whenever a user sends a message (text or photo) it is displayed instantly on the screen of users following him/her. What is the best way to make such an application for:
mobile
web
I have some web programming experience and the only way I know to do this in web is to send an ajax call every second from a user's client. My feeling tells me there should be a better way. I did some research and found webrtc. Is that the way to go? I (and probably many other users) will be grateful if you can explain the pros and cons of the solution you suggest.
Thanks a lot.

If you want to build conference app/ messaging app for web/mobile platform you can use latest web technologies.
Node.js is an Javascript framework which does efficient and non blocking IO and it works really well with applications which are not data intesive which involve lot of calculations.
Please go through Node.js and libraries associated with it, you can ahieve building efficient chat application.

Related

Mobile App from Web App, caching data/login

I have a given Javascript browser application with login screen and data display screen. It does request JSON data via calls that are always the same (i.e. http://myserver.lol/api/getData?mobile), the data changing only slightly over time.
What I want is a mobile app for Android/iOS/Windows Phone/Blackberry, which
-> at best "caches" the whole web site (html/js...) in the app, so I don't have to rebuild the app whenever the web app changes;
-> provides some form of "auto-login"/"auto-form-fill", so the user does not have to give his credentials every time, and
-> some kind of long-term cache for the JSON data, so it is requested from server when a fast network connection (LTE/WLAN) is available, but taken from Cache on GSM or without connection.
Which Framework would allow to implement this the easiest? I am just now looking at the PhoneGap docs and the Titanium docs, but I guess I am overlooking something, or don't they provide an easy solution for this? Or perhaps you have an insider tip for me on another framework?
You can definitely handle this buy using both frameworks. I use only Phonegap / Cordova.
I would do this all by building the application with Phonegap together with AngularJS.
You can use templates in there, so you don't have to fetch the Ui from your server.
To cache data (user credentials or JSON data) I would just use the localStorage which is available on all devices (see here).
I recommend angularJS because it is a really great framework which helps you build Web-Applications really fast (but if you already have an existing application this might not be an option for you).
I hope this helps ;-)

MySQL into iOS Application (Xcode 5)

I am new to app making, but I have a small tech review site that I am trying to grow and I want to make an app for. Its pretty simple what I am setting up. To start, I am using MySQL to have three basic things. The review's picture, the title, and the review itself. The idea of this is so I can have other users log in to write reviews and it can load easily on an app, the website, etc... The most trouble I am having is in Xcode trying to make an app for this. I want two basic screens. A list of all the reviews with the picture on the left, and the title, and when you click on it, it takes you to the second screen displaying the review itself. Does that make sense?
(I am using Xcode 5 on Mac OS X 10.9. This App is intended for iOS)
-Thank You!
*Moderators, I apologize if this is a duplicate question, I have searched and have not found an answer.
If I understand correctly what is your asking then you probably need to rephrase the question and edit the tags. Because it has nothing to do with xcode5, mysql, uitableview or even iOS.
Before you start designing your iOS app, you need to think the overall architecture for your service. The client iOS app shouldn't (and usually can't) communicate directly with a database server (mysql in your case), you need to think about a server side API layer for your iOS app to consume.
You need to outline your web API and decide what is its interface (entry points, resources, data structures), take a look at REST architecture, for example. Decide on your data exchange format (e.g. JSON, XML). Then decide what platform and framework you want to create your API layer with (e.g. PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Asp.net etc).
Your iOS app itself sounds like a simple classic Master-Detail pattern and what you wrote is a good start (Google for master detail examples, plenty of them for iOS as well). Your question is too broad here, you need to be more specific in order for people to be able to help you with the app itself.

Options to enable web software to work offline? Or perhaps build desktop software?

I created a scheduling software for beauty salons as a web application. The idea is that the business owner can schedule customer appointments with a hair stylist. I made it web based because eventually these beauty salons need to integrated into a larger cloud service. So far, I've only put in about 40 hours of coding.
One challenge i am encountering is that a lot of beauty salons may have poor internet connectivity. They may experience temporary outage that last several hours to several days. But during this time, they still want access to this web application .. at the very least for read only purposes.
I understand that html 5 in modern browsers support offline capabilities via things like localStorage and cache manifest. It appears to me that at the moment, I need to do a drastic rewrite of my existing application to make use of localStorage and cache manifest to allow the web application to work offline. The reason this is so is because my web application writes/saves a lot of information to urls like http://mywebsite.com/api/somefunction?queryparams=value1 via ajax calls. These ajax calls need to be replaced by function calls that write to localstorage.
So my questions are:
a) To enable my web application to work offline (at the very least, read only of the website should be offline), I should replace my ajax calls with calls to localStorage. Is this the best approach?
b) Would it have been better to create this application as a .NET desktop application? Especially if there are microsoft technologies that help with synchronizing stored client data with an external database at a later time?
My opinion:
a) I wouldn't say you should replace your Ajax calls. Rather, you want your code to notice when it is offline and store stuff in localStorage then. You wouldn't always store in localStorage as your clients are going to be online sometimes.
b) That's kind of a loaded question I think. :) So... my thinking is this: Building a web site makes sense as it would let your clients at the salon access their data both from computers in the store and other devices as well. So for example - if the salon's internet access is down, the employees could perhaps use your website via their mobile phones too. Having the data be web bound gives them more ways to get to it.

How to build a programmable website?

I'm developing pretty normal, non-brilliant Web 2.0 applications, like blogs, forums, social networks, etc.
APIs, mashups, greasemonkey-like works are okay for developers. But for end-users, my websites can't provide something more than a-gazillion-paper magazine. I want my users to create their own program logic to create information, access to data and communicate each other based on their own way.
The most advanced programmability on the websites are all about "Show 20 results per page", moving GUI elements around or changing colors of design.
Is there a study or do you have an idea to make websites allow their users to manipulate/create application logic, data structure, access methods both in client-side and server-side easily?
Thanks!
Please accept my apologizes for poor English, I'm not a native speaker.
Short answer, no. Long answer, not yet but this is probably a long term goal of web development overall. There are some "build your own web apps" web apps around but none of them go much beyond your simple description.
The most useful thing I have come across is something called pyjsglade:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyjsglade/
Which lets someone build a web gui in an IDE which then automagically turns into a webpage with full AJAX capabilities. It doesn't do everything you want but it's worth a look certainly.

Where can I start about designing a website

I want to design a website but I don't know from where to start.
Is there a beginners' guide to start with?
How much dedication do you hope to provide? If you merely want to design a single website, quickly and dirty, there's a plethora of open source web templates available online, with clean and basic HTML/XHTML design strategies that you could modify, and provide content for.
Such as this and that.
Alternatively, if you would like to design your own websites from scratch and have full technical knowledge in the field (the proper way). Pick up a book or two on HTML/XHTML/XML, with documentation on content management systems, php, etc.
You'd soon find that in the beginning your development would be gradual and at best, slow. If you put in sufficient effort, you would find that you get to the point where you can quickly design sites confidently, which best illuminate your content.
You should be familiar with this and this
Try this Web Design from Scratch
I understand by website you mean some kind of web-app. And by design you mean, not just the page design but the design of the web-app. First, you have to understand the anatomy of a web-app. The major components are:
Database is used to store user and application data for long term. A database provides query functionality (SQL), backup on one installation and restore on another, triggers when a data entry changes, and constraints that must be satisfied by the data tables.
Web Server, also called Http Server hosts the web application.
Web Browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
When a user types a URL into the web browser, the web server forwards the URL to the corresponding web application. The web application performs the needed tasks (which may involve reading or writing into the database) and returns a new html page to the user via www.
Some components of the web application are:
Database access objects are representations of objects that encapsulate interaction with database tables.
Business Logic is the main logic of the application. Here we implement the search functionality using Lucene library, for example.
Action Handler handles a http request received from the user, for example when she types a URL or when she clicks on the "submit" button. These are Http GET and POST requests. The Action Handler uses the business logic to drive the actions.
Data view on the web brower is constructed using some template library (which usually produces javascript user interface code for the web browser). For interactivity one may use Ajax techniques.
Almost all web-apps separate the model, view and controller of a web application. The view deals with the display, the model deals with data and the controller deals with control/functioning. See http://www.uidesign.net/Articles/Papers/UsingMVCPatterninWebInter.html.
Several frameworks implement MVC. The most easy ones to get started are Ruby on Rails and Django (over which an open source social network called Pinax too is written). There are much more comprehensive frameworks and libraries in java too (for a single web appl you may need to join several of these libraries), such as spring, webwork, tapestry, lucene (for search), sitemesh (for page decoration). Many java web apps run on tomcat web server and with mysql database.
I started with http://w3schools.com. Make sure you're using Firefox and the Firebug addon. Get your hands dirty then get familiar with the web design community.
I have CSS Mastery by Andy Budd on my desk and it's a good, readable, short, yet deep guide to CSS.
Don't Make me think has also become my mantra of web design.
Overall, you're going to produce a lot of crap--as I have--before you get good. If you have someone to look over what you're doing that'll be the best help. Personal drive will matter the most in the long run though, so stick with it and keep learning.
Liz Castro has a good book too.