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Closed 10 years ago.
First off, kudos to the amazing apache cordova team for making a platform-independent native-like app-building platform - great stuff.
But as we know that HTML5 is still in the draft mode, and i'm thinking of applying Cordova in that direction, what are the technical limits for Cordova right now?
And what's the pros and cons compared to Sencha Touch 2, as i see ST2 popping up during my Cordova searches.
There are no technical limits on Cordova in the sense you're thinking of.
Cordova provides a means to package JS, HTML and CSS in an app, which is run in a native web view. You may hear an argument that any new features added to native SDKs can't be used because you have to wait for Cordova to implement it. That's false, there's nothing stopping anyone from accessing the new features natively through JS.
The technical limits are actually on the browsers that your web tech runs in.
Before iOS5 there is no position: fixed, so that's a limit for developers who want to support iOS5<. They're forced to use something like iScroll or actually take the hybrid approach by mixing a UINavigationBar with the UIWebView. I've done that and it was difficult.
Another limit is the click event taking 300ms to fire, so responsiveness is bad. This has been solved many times though, most recently by Google
There's plenty of other problems out there, like flickering during transitions and things that Thomas Fuchs has blogged about. Seriously, that guy is a genius.
I once came across a bug which caused the page resolution to decrease by showing and hiding child divs inside a parent div that had a css transform applied. Really strange stuff.
Sencha Touch is a good framework that you can try out for your web apps but it's not related to Cordova on a functional level
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Closed 9 years ago.
I've started learning and researching HTML5, I only ever studied HTML classic some 6 years ago and I never got quite far with it.
I want to build a website and publish it to the WWW.
Should I stick with HTML4 for now? Or should I just jump straight into HTML5?
I've read & I understand that a lot of the new elements are not supported, but I feel a bit stupid to type outdated tags. Are HTML5 elements more supported in 2013?
Is it better to just start with 5 now, as the future is HTML5?
I've also started doing CSS3 and I think it would benefit me rather than CSS2.
Thank you everyone.
I suggest you give "The truth about html5" a read if you have the time.
Html5 so to speak offers a lot of new stuff. But the reality of the market is a bunch of stuff either just plain works with a handful of browsers, and other stuff has been around for years and simply got included under the so to say html5 branding.
Also keep in mind that ie8 still represents a huge piece of the pie of the ie landscape and will do so for years to come. In the end it all comes down to what your project target audience is and how many percent of users you are willing to sacrifice or allowed to sacrifice.
Caniuse.com should be of good use to you, and understanding when and how too use polyfills too.
Myself I manage a big site which uses a bunch of html5, css3, and responsive design that scales from mobile phones to tablets to desktops, and works just fine in ie7 too.
But it didn't suffice to say hey let's code it in html5, but instead took a lot of reflection and compromises to get there.
So actually my answer would be: use the parts of css3 that degrade gracefully as much as you like. The parts of html5 that you find indispensable ..at the condition you have a fallback polyfill in place. And the rest ..think 20 times before jumping on the buzzword bandwagon.
In the end you don't even have to choose between html4/5 or css2/3. You can mix and match both easily .. as the latter simply build on the previous. As long as you know what you are doing, and why.
But yes learn it !
You should code your website in a language that meets your website's requirements.
What I mean by this is if your proposed website will include features of html 5, then you should write it in html 5.
You could most probably achieve the same or a similar effect using html 4, but why go to the bother when html 5 has built in features to help you.
I personally would use html 5 anyway as you are essentially future proofing your project for some years to come.
Also use CSS3 but just check the availability of rules in browsers.
Hope this helped.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am a Flex developer. I think Flash builder is a great development environment for developing rich internet applications , 3D games, etc.
Now I am worried about the latest news related to Flex. Some blogs and news wrote flex is going to die. Another one wrote flex has not died.
How can I know latest updates about Flex in Apache. I am visiting Apache incubator site about Flex daily
http://incubator.apache.org/flex/
http://blogs.apache.org/flex/.
But I didn't get a satisfying answer. I read many articles I found with google search. I'm a little confused about the future of flex. I don't know how I can develop applications in HTML5 instead of Flex. I think it is too difficult. I can't develop big rich applications using html5 like www.pixlr.com, dashboard applications , Flash 3D games etc. Html5 is concept with oops?
I also have some more questions.
Why did adobe abandon flex?
What progressions will happen in Apache incubator for flex
What is real future of flex in Rich Internet Applications World?
In stack overflow, there is lot of specialists, developers and researchers .So I think stack overflow is a good place to ask these questions.
I expect this should be helpful for all Flex programmers.
Please help.
I think Adobe "abandons" Flex because of the difficulty to maintain the flash player on mobile multi-platforms. You can't have the flash player plugin, and generally plugins, installed everywhere : it asks a lot of efforts to make it work on every device.
Today, thanks to ios (and android) popularity, everything is application based. I just think that, naturally, Air is the best technology to work with, since it produces platform dependant executables with platform independant source code.
Since they don't have the time to keep on raising Flex, they give it to the Apache community, which have great projects like the HTTP Server.
Well, probably, HTML5 will be best in the future. Or not. HTML5 is a community language, Flex had a private owner. But now, Flex is free of his private owner, so it will naturally compete with HTML5.
At the moment, it is stable, mature, and the best RIA choice.
I think Flex has a great future.
But that's just my point of view :)
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Closed 10 years ago.
jqMobi? Sencha? Or other one? Why?
Thank you!
I have to repeat contents above in order to being able to post this question.
jqMobi? Sencha? Or other one? Why?
Thank you!
I'm the lead dev of jqMobi. bensnider is correct, in that Sencha is an all in one type of framework. But a lot of people have had problems with that. You can't use a single component in your project, it's "Sencha" or nothing. If you like that, it's a solid framework.
With jqUi, the UI part of jqMobi, you can use backbone.js as the back end or another MVC type framework and use jqUi as just the presentation layer.
It also depends on what your target is. If you are soley iOS, Sencha shines there, but Android support on Sencha (even V2) is still really lacking.
Sencha Touch 2 has been really nice for us (barring the pre-release churn) since it bridges UI and data all in one framework. V2 has also added some really nice MVC support with routes and and actual controllers and all that jazz. As always its data stores and models are very nice, now borrowing heavily from Ext. Now that the beta has landed I highly recommend starting new projects with it.
Looking at the other frameworks, most of them aren't an all in one type framework, requiring you to depend on or create libraries for data storage, remote resources, etc. In addition, Sencha is now probably the most mature framework, and has a nice developer community around it.
Another key consideration is which specific devices/platforms you want to support, and what the experience on those devices is. e.g. Sencha Touch 2 does not support Android 3. I'd encourage you to try the example applications on some physical devices you want to support:
http://www.jqmobi.com/testdrive/
http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2-0/touch/examples/production/kitchensink/
For disclosure, I've developed a business app using Sencha Touch but not jqMobi.
It really depends on what you are trying to do, what your comfort zone is etc.
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Closed 12 years ago.
It is said that the unreleased HTML 5 and CSS 3 can produce the effects and graphics which can be done in Microsoft Silverlight. It thats true then can I skip learning Silverlight and wait for HTML5 and CSS 3?
Silverlight is a tool for developing web applications (RIA - Rich Internet Applications).
Pure HTML+ CSS (even if it is HTML5 and CSS3) will only produce web sites unless you put some code/framework behind them.
Therefore while visually they might look similar they are two completely separate things behind the scenes.
It's like comparing apples and oranges, but one thing is makes HTML 5 + CSS better then Silverlight: It runs on every modern browser, mobile device, etc...
You don't need to wait for HTML5 and CSS 3, they are here today and can be used right now. Web standards aren't 'released' in the way software is, they are standardisations of existing browser implementations.
What front-end technology you choose very much depends on project requirements, some things that are easy in Flash/Silverlight are just not possible yet or really hard to achieve using web standards (think Canvas and WebGL).
There is no definitive answer for this, and there may never be.
HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript, you mean? The future of RIAs does look bright given the promise of these technologies; however, they do not likely represent a replacement for Silverlight right now. If you need to build a complex web app now, Silverlight can do it, and even though some browsers like Chrome, Safari and Firefox have already implemented parts of HTML5, the support is too jagged to allow you to build a stable cross-browser application.
Silverlight, however, should behave the same way in all browser on all OSes.
if you use silverlight (and/or flash) only for a nice layout and some stuff like animations, yuo don't need it - this can be done with html5/css3 only.
but note that silverlight (and/or flash) give your a lot of possibilities to write applications witch can do a lot more stuff.
The only reason I prefere to use Flash/Silverlight over HTML+JS+CSS is, they run pretty much similarly on all platforms and they are independent of browser's code, although html has some standard but coders dont have any standard, similar functionality needs different javascript in different browser, more over rendering html elements is also different on different browser so does printing.
No matter HTML5 or HTML 10 coming in future will attract developers, but not implementing correct standards by OS and browsers will always make them weak enough.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I heard Joel and Jeff talking about sIFR in one of the early podcasts. I've been using it on www.american-data.com and www.chartright.us with some fairly mixed results.
Yesterday I was informed that the first line of text on my website appeared upside down in Internet Explorer 6 without flash player. I'm pretty sure that assessment was wrong, owing to no flash player = no sIFR. But I'm getting some odd behavior on my pages, at least in IE 6, 7 and 8. I only really wanted to use sIFR because my fonts looked crummy on my computer in Firefox.
My question is: if you use sIFR, when do you use sIFR? In which cases do you disable sIFR? When is it better to just use the browser font?
You use sIFR moderately, say for headlines. Try not to use it for links, because links in Flash don't work as well as normal HTML links. It also makes little sense to use sIFR only for text that never changes, an image would work a lot better.
I haven't heard about the upside-down problem in a few years now, but in any case, that's an issue with IE 6 and (an old?) Flash player. In any case, it always makes sense to test thoroughly.
Also, did you look into sIFR 3 lately? It's much improved over v2.
I had plenty of headaches after implementing sIFR on my last website project. Most of the problems were to do with browser inconsistencies like you are describing. Text would appear in odd places, not wrap properly or just not display the way I wanted it to. I found that, as per usual, firefox was displaying nicely while I had to implement several different css hacks in order to get the same code to display properly in IE7 and IE6.
I say stick to standard browser fonts if you can, but if the project / client requires you to use it then make sure you test it thoroughly in all browsers and with various flash blockers etc.
Try to consider up front what kind of headache you're creating for yourself (if you are, which isn't always the case) by implementing sIFR. It's probably advisable to only use it when your site design is relatively straightforward. As soon as you start having to deal with specific browser rendering exceptions (CSS, for instance) due to a complex design, you're going to run into problems related to sIFR. And if you design sites for clients, it's tough to go back and tell them halfway through that sIFR is going to have to be removed. So try to identify issues up front.
One example we ran into was having sIFR titles, and then directly to the right of the title, say about padding-right: 20px (so, dependent on the width of the title text), some kind of icon. That led to a lot of hassle, making us wish we hadn't started using sIFR in the first place.