I want to develop an html5 app for both windows 8 and windows phone 8.
What is the best storage technique, I thought about the following options:
Local Storage
IndexDB
Please tell me what storage mechanism to use? Can I use IndexDB in windows phone 8 (unable to find any article talking about it with WP8) ? Any idea of quota limit?
P.S. If you want to suggest any other storage technique then it is also fine.
DETAILS
IndexDB seems to be a good option, but
this link, confused me by talking about quota and saying
Indexed Database, each app has a quota of 250MB. Among all apps on the device, the limit is 4% of the disk size or 20GB, whichever is smaller. For hard drives that are less than 30GB, the limit among all apps on the device is 375MB. Because of the overall quota among all apps, test your app to ensure it functions properly when it can store very little or even no data because other apps consume the overall quota.
Though in the end the article talks about creating contact app and uses IndexDB to store contact info.
Use Phonegap. It has a local storage class you can make use of.
The localStorage on windows phone is not the best one. Sometimes it didn't work.
I use the dataBase and it's work like a charm. Here is the link http://docs.phonegap.com/en/2.8.0/cordova_storage_storage.md.html#Storage
And then you can request it to get information. It's very helpfull and I think It could be a good starting point for you
Related
I am building an application with the following requirements:
Must run on both mobile phones and tablets
Must support online/offline scenarios
Requires geolocation
Requires local storage
Platform is unknown at the moment (due to the nature of this project, I cannot yet rely on a particular platform version, e.g. Android 4+ or Windows 8.1)
I am leaning towards building this in HTML5/CSS/jQuery/Bootstrap. Since HTML5 supports both geolocation and local storage, and since I do not need to use any device feature such as a camera, I don't think something like PhoneGap is necessary.
However, as I am new to mobile development and PhoneGap, I am not sure if I am missing something. Are there any reasons - apart from future-proofing against future requirements - why I should consider using PhoneGap even though I don't think I need it for any particular reason? Is there value in having its API sitting in front of any interaction with the devices upon which my application will be running?
Factors to consider with respect to Local Storage.
Local Storage size limit:
Web storage provides far greater storage capacity (5 MB per origin in Google Chrome,Mozilla Firefox,and Opera; 10 MB per storage area in Internet Explorer;25MB per origin on BlackBerry 10 devices) compared to 4 kB (around 1000 times less space) available to cookies. ( source Wiki)
Local Storage Method.
Web Storage:
Web SQL Database:
Indexed Database:
File Access:
source: html5rocks, sitepoint
All MOBILE broswers have varying degree of support for above local storage method.
The most widely supported method is Web Storage.
If you would like to store more than the limits mentioned above than you need to use the native (OS) features for storing data. Then PhoneGap is the obvious choice for accessing native features.
How are you planning to distribute your app!! If you want to distribute using a website, then may be you don't need phonegap. BUT..... if you want it as an mobile app, then you'll need phonegap to easily wrap your code. Phonegap will help you to build installation package for many platforms (e.g. APK for android)
I have to develop an application that track user experience. When he used my application? how much he spent time using it ? so is there thread or attributes that i could use them to know if my application is running, is opened or is closed ?
You can either write all your own code to track usage with timers etc., to track events when it is started and when it shutdown etc.. Then write a lot more code to somehow store that data for you to access.
Or you can use one of many analytic tools that are available to really reduce your development time and stress of figuring all this out.
Google Analytics for Windows Phone
Article from Nokia on how to use Flurry Analytics
PreEmptive also used to make one for Windows Phone
You can use an analytics solution like Google Analytics for tracking app usage. You can take a look at this article i wrote on my blog (original in spanish, automatic translated with microsoft translator).
Hope this helps you.
Is there a technical reason, why a Google Drive application must be installed through the Chrome Web Store (which severely limits the number of potential users)?
The reason that installation is required is to give users the ability to access applications from within the Google Drive user interface. Without installation, users would have no starting point for most applications, as they would not be able to start at a specific file, and then choose an application.
That said, I realize it can be difficult to work with in early development. We (the Google Drive team) are evaluating if we should remove this requirement or not. I suspect we'll have a final answer/solution in the next few weeks.
Update: We have removed the installation requirement. Chrome Web Store installation is no longer required for an app to work with a user's Drive transparently, but it is still required to take advantage of Google Drive UI integrations.
To provide the create->xxx behaviour that makes a new application document from the drive interface, and to be able to open existing documents from links, there must be some kind of manifest registered with Google's systems and some kind of agreement from the user that an application can access your documents and work with specific file types. There's little way around this when you think about the effects of not doing this.
That said, there are two high level issues that make for compatibility problems.
As the poster says, the requirement to install in the chrome store
severely limits the number of potential users.
But why? Why do the majority of Chrome Web Store applications say that they only work on Chrome? Most of these are wrappers to web applications that work on a range of browsers, yet you click through a selection and most display "works on chrome", aka only installs on chrome.
Before we launched our application on chrome we found that someone had created "xxxxxxx launcher" in the store, that simply forwards to our web app page. We're still wondering why it only "works on chrome". I suspect that some default template for the web store has:
"container" : "CHROME",
in it, which is the configuration option to say chrome only. That said, I can't find one, so I'm very confused why this is. It would be healthier if people picked Chrome because it's the better browser (which it is in a number of regards), not because their choice is limited if they don't. People can always write to the application vendor and ask if this limitation is really necessary.
The second thought is that a standardised manifest format across cloud storage providers would mean a much higher take up in web app vendors. Although, it isn't hugely complex to integrate, for example, with Google Drive, the back-end and ironing out the the details took over a week in total. Multiply that lots of storage providers and you have you lose an engineer for 2 months + the maintenance afterwards. The more than is common across vendor integration, the more likely it is to happen.
And while I'm on it, a JavaScript widget for opening and saving (I know Google have opening) by each cloud storage provider would improve integration by web app vendors. We should be using one storage providers across multiple applications, not one web application across multiple storage providers, the file UI should be common to the storage provider.
In order to sync with the local file system, one would need to install a browser plug-in in order to bridge the Web with the local computer. By default, Web applications don't have file I/O permissions on the user's hard drive for security reasons. Browser extensions, on the other hand, do not suffer from this limitation as it's assumed that when you, the user, give an application permission to be installed on your computer, you give it permissions to access more resources on the local computer.
Considering the add-on architectures for different browsers are different, Google first decided to build this application for their platform first. You can also find Google Drive in the Android/Play marketplace, one of Google's other app marketplaces.
In the future, if Google Drive is successful, there may very well be add-ons created for Firefox and Internet Explorer, but this of course has yet to be done and depends on whether or not Google either releases the API's to the public or internally makes a decision to develop add-ons for other browsers as well.
I am building a mobile app that must work in Blackberry, iPhone and Android phones. I am building this mobile app in HTML5, CSS and JQuery Mobile. Then I will use PhoneGap to allow the code to run as a native mobile app for the phone. The mobile app must be able to work without connection to the internet. The only time the app must require an internet connection is when it loads for the first time, because that's when the app will download over 50 MB worth of data. Next time the app has internet connectivity, it will poll the server for more recent data to consume.
My problem lies in where do I store 50 mb worth of data which can be updated when internet connectivity exists?
Additional Notes
I've been discouraged by others to use Web SQL Database because the specification is no longer in active maintenance. I've read that localStorage and cache manifest has a storage limit of about 3-5 mb depending on the browser. From experience, I've encountered a lot of challenges working with the PhoneGap API to create one set of code that will reliably write to all of the following file systems: ios, bb, android.
Based on your needs: (store 10,000 images, 10,000 pdfs, +videos etc.) I don't think a "lightweight" HTML5 application is going to suit your needs.
I think that a native application is likely going to work much better where you have proper filesystem access to store the files on the device as needed (and even structure them better).
The HTML5 localStorage (5mb) and the WebSQL (SQLLite) (5mb-~50mb) database options really won't give you what you need as far as I can tell.
WebApp "wrappers" like PhoneGap and WebWorks (for BlackBerry) will give you the filesystem access you need, but I'm not sure if either of them have limitations that you'll hit size/quantity wise... hopefully someone with experience in these wrapper frameworks can indicate any size limits they've encountered.
I have created a hosted app for Chrome and I am wondering if there is any way that I can get more than 4 MB offline storage in Chrome.
I have looked at this post http://code.google.com/chrome/webstore/faq.html#faq-app-15 but one says that it is possible to increase Chrome's offline storage by up to ~260MB. Is this really possible? if so, is there any example that illustrates that possibility?
I have also looked at this stackoverflow's post and WebSQL DB appears to not have a limit. so is WebSQL DB or IndexedDB an only option for chrome app to store larger offline contents?
Thank you for your feedback
Take a look at the Quota Management API: http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/11/Quota-Management-API-Fast-Facts
Or, if you're creating a hosted app, you can use the unlimitedStorage permission to surpass the quota limits: http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/developers_guide.html