I have a new project starting up that consists of building a webapp for a workorder based system. The main views are:
Viewing all open/closed/hold work-orders,
View Detail of Workorders
Create new Work orders
Account management.
In addition to being a webapp, it should also function as a mobile app.
What is the best approach for doing this? Will i have to develop a separate app for the mobile side? Can i use my webapp + sencha, jquery mobile, something.. that can work with my logic, classes, HTML structure to have it effectively work on mobile?
Or do i develop a mobile version first and think about progressive enhancement to the webapp (website)?
This question is open to all interpretations of flow, process, technologies.
Thank you Stack Overflowers.
Seperate out your business logic and model code from the view layer. Then use sencha touch and Extjs to create both a web and mobile (mobile web atleast) application. You can then reuse the model and business logic code and use the different frameworks to manage the view. When you have a mobile app running, use phone gap to turn it into a full-fledged app (assumming you need access to phone only systems (camera etc)).
We've done this with our own custom framework built on top of Ext and Sencha. We use ActiveRecord to run the models and then have a compile script that knows which files are for mobile and which are for web. We can then have all the code in the one repository and use the compiler to produce versions for the correct type (mobile or web).
It's definitely not a good idea to start with the mobile app, since web browsers are more ubiquitous than smart phones. Start with the web application and tailor the UI so that it can be easily displayed on smart phones as well as desktop browsers. If that's not a viable route, you could have a regular version and a mobile version of your website. In general, I think the overhead of writing a dedicated mobile client to browse your website is greater than the payoff unless you want to take advantage of the phones' hardware features like GPS or sensors (and even GPS you can still access from a web app using W3C geolocation api).
Related
Have you already developed a Xamarin app whose views are generated from a Json recovered when launching the application?
I met a client with this kind of need:
they are developing a web app to prototype the screens by adding and positioning some controls (TextBox, Label, ...)
this generates a Json that must be interpreted by the Xamarin app: this will build the different views dynamically
in a first version, the user's data would be stored locally (through a file or SQLite) and synchronized "manually" when the device is connected to a computer
the app will work on Android only in a first time, and then on WPF
The client has not yet decided between Xamarin.Forms or Xamarin native, but it's probably more interesting to do it through Xamarin.Forms, even if iOS is not required: this should make porting on WPF easier.
Have worked on similar cases? Have you some recommendations? Are there plugins or patterns that could be used to simplify this development?
I've found this one, but it doesn't seem to be the same use.
There is also this article on iOS, but there is not the same thing on Android.
This would in theory be possible using a massive code behind builder for a page but should NOT be done for a production app. Mobile apps have very specific requirements that need to be thought of before attempting.
Xamarin is great for simplifying code reuse, and if you use Xamarin Forms you can reuse the UI components for Enterprise apps.(the less fancy and pixel perfect the layouts need to be the better. )
Your client would be better served by making it a mobile compatible web page instead from the details you have shared.
I am creating an web application for user to manage their schedule. It will be MVC3/4 application. I want to know what will be the best approach to make it as mobile compatible also.
I read few articles online like using a phone gap,Kendo UI or a HTML 5 responsive view etc.Well i would love to try it all but dont ahve enough time to try it all.So what will be the best approach to handle this problem. Website will basic login,registration,Grids for data information and maybe a google calender intrigation for scheduling. User will be using this website on their desktop and also on their mobile devices.
Thanks in advance,
Arpan
I will definitely go with ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile
Since you are already building a web application, ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile will allow you to reuse your current model and controllers, and just build the presentation layer for mobile, you don't even have to take care of deciding which view to show to each device, MVC 4 will select the correct view when accessed from a mobile browser.
Note that this proposal implicitly chooses HTML5.
Kendo UI is a tool that will save time for complex controls like the schedule you plan to build, but it is not a different technology and you can add these controls later when you really need them.
Once your application is mature enough, then you can build a Native App to have better interoperation with the smartphone's own schedule, contacts and other features. When that moment arrives check out Xamarin that will allow you to build for any mobile platform using your existing C# knowledge. But do that later, start with the browser based version until the app mature.
I have developed an web app using MVC4- mobile and HTML5. Every things is working fine when we enter URL from any phone. But i am wondering how to convert my web app into hybrid app so that i could upload in istore or GooglePlay.
Please help me with the procedure or steps i need to follow and is there any tool other than phoneGap that i could use.
Thanks in advance.
There are few options but I will mention only two of them.
Most commonly used is a Phonegap/Cordova app wrapper framework (Also my main choice). Cordova is a new name for a Phonegap framework. It will give you an access to common mobile phone functionalities (Android, iPhone, Blackberry and WP7+). It is rather easy to use and there are a lot of vorking tutorials available, you can even find them in youtube.
Here's an phonegap link: http://cordova.apache.org/. There you will find tutorials how to install/configure it on all available platforms. This is a older link: enter link description here, it still has usable informations.
If in doubt always search for phonegap examples instead of cordova. For some reason Phonegap is still a mostly used name.
Here's an Phonegap + jQuery Mobile example: http://therockncoder.blogspot.com/2012/07/jquery-mobile-phonegap-and-camera.html, there you will find a github link for Android and iOS implementation.
Through the PhoneGap javascript APIs, the "web app" has access to the mobile phone functions such as Geolocation, Accelerometer Camera, Contacts, Database, File system, etc. Basically any function that the mobile phone SDK provides can be "bridged" to the javascript world. On the other hand, a normal web app that runs on the mobile web browser does not have access to most of these functions (security being the primary reason). Therefore, a PhoneGap app is more of a mobile app than a web app. You can certainly use PhoneGap to wrap a web app that does not use any PhoneGap APIs at all, but that is not what PhoneGap was created for.
Now some disadvantages. With PhoneGap for each platform you have to maintain a different project. The burden for that increases when there is a need to use multiple PhoneGap plugins because you need to search and update different files on each platform.
Mosync is also an excellent solution. This framework has a few things better handled then Phonegap. Like:
With MoSync you’ll have only one project to maintain for all the platforms. For iOS you will still need to use Xcode because MoSync outputs a project for it but, other than just building it, there is no need to dig deeper in Apple’s IDE.
The entire provided functionality for JavaScript is placed in the same file for all of the operating systems. There are no files for plugins because it has none (at least that I know of), but the same extensibility is achieved in ways described in the next section.
If there is some functionality that MoSync doesn’t provide on the JavaScript side, there are no plugins that you can use, but there is another way. MoSync provides a lot of features from the C++ side and if they aren’t accessible from JavaScript by default they can be easily made available. I’m sure that in the future the MoSync team will add more features to the JavaScript library.
With MoSync you are not restricted to only JavaScript frameworks to replicate native UI, you can truly create native UI elements that are more responsive using only JavaScript.
Rhomobile on the other hand is much less used thus a lot less supported.
I heard few good things about this framework but never had time to learn/use it.
RhoMobile applications are OS-agnostic, able to support enterprise-
and consumer-class operating systems including Windows® Embedded
Handheld, Windows® CE, Windows® Phone 7 Series, Apple® iOS, Android®
and BlackBerry®. You have complete control over how applications
behave on different devices. With RhoMobile Suite, you are finally
free from OS design constraints, able to create business applications
that are every bit as elegant looking and intuitive as their consumer
counterparts (This was copied from their main site).
I was thinking of writing a simple android app that would just contain my notes I've made for my job for my own personal reference. I figuered perhaps some of my co-workers would want to use this app too, but most of them use IPhones. I don't own any Apple products and I know nothing about developing for iOS. After some research I've decided perhaps the best approach is to develope the 'app' as a website instead, to be viewed offline. Does this approach make sense, and could I distribute such a product on an Apple device without any issues?
I'd recommend developing an offline application with PhoneGap. PhoneGap allows you to build your app once with web--standards, wrap it with PhoneGap, and then deploy it to multiple mobile platforms.
I am contemplating buying an iPad and am wondering what options I will have for developing an app for personal use ... specifically whether I will be able to do it as an offline browser app. The app currently exists as an Android Java app; it interacts with a large local database (about 3MB) and displays images and text drawn from a very large pool of resources stored locally (about 2GB).
My immediate questions are:
How would I get the files (html/javascript, database, images and text) transferred into the iPad's storage from a Windows PC? With Android this is a simple matter of hooking up via USB and using Windows Explorer. Googling suggests that for an iPad I might have to use an app on Windows called DiskAid, but this costs $25 which seems a bit steep for my simple purpose. Are there free alternatives?
Once the files are installed on the iPad how would I run the html app? On Android this appears to be a matter of keying "file:///sdcard/MyBrowserAppFolder/mybrowserapp.htm" into the browser's address box. Does th iPad browser work in a similar way.
There are two basic kinds of applications that run on iOS.
Mobile designed web applications that are hosted on a server and accessed through Safari or another browser.
Native applications built using Xcode and usually objective-c.
For the latter, you could use the phonegap framework to build an app using existing html and javascript.
My personal advice is to invest the time to learning how to code this up using objective-c. Depending on what format your db is in, importing the structure and data might be trivial. It will take an investment of time, but doing things using the native tools is the best choice for iOS development in my opinion. I was in the same situation (PHP, VB.NET and Javascript developer) and just decided to take the time and learn to do it right. This was a great decision and the development time of a simple to moderate application takes very little time now.
Safari on iOS does not support the URL's of type file:// natively. So you either write your own app, purchase an app or use something like a local web server after jailbreaking.
Alternatively, and if you can verify that the app you have mentioned does what you want to do, then maybe $25 is not so much of a price. Depends on what your time is worth :)
However there are cheaper apps around that allow to transfer and read html via wifi and usb. (Not sure I can name them here)
The USB transfer aka iTunes Filesharing is a standard function that a developer can enable in the info.plist of their app. Many apps use this to transfer data between Computer and iDevice.