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I have started to building PWA without understanding the internal meaning of it. When I searched, PWA gives a native app like look and feel to web apps progressively using the following technology
Manifest
Service workers
Designing App shell
Push notification support for web apps
I found difficult to understand the inner meaning of Progressive in
PWA. Any help is much appreciated.
From what I have understood a progressive web app needs to support progressive enhancement.
Progressive enhancement is a strategy that begins with common browser features, and then adds in functionality or enhancements when the user's browser supports more modern technologies.
Features like service worker, notifications will be added only if the browser supports it and not break the application in older browsers.
This enables your application to run properly in a wide range of browsers with decent user experience.
You can find more details here
As explained in this answer, all PWA features are not supported in every browser/platform yet (mar-2018). Also, new PWA features will be keep coming as the technology evolves. Said that, for you to have a PWA site, you don't have to implement all PWA features to take advantages it provided or to call it a PWA site.
This is not like a standards compliance, where you have to be 100% compliant to call it a "Compliant" site.
You can start with the basic things like having a manifest file to support "Add to home screen" and may be offline capability using service workers and your site is already taking good advantage of PWA.
You can keep "Progressing" on more features as you continue to develop your app. And hence its "Progressive" web application :)
"Progressive Web Apps" has been foisted on the Web App development community by those of the left (especially California) who equate "progressive" with "liberal".
Most everyone else uses just "Web App" or "Ultimate Web App" to be annoying.
The "progressive" adjective could apply to the best-endeavour nature of a PWA in that it will degrade gracefully if certain functionality is unavailable or if that functionality is embargoed due to lack of User Permissions. Analogous to the limp-home-mode in your car.
I am told that Chrome now treats pWAs as first-class Android apps but I have yet to experience them in the App Drawer. Lighthouse struggles to distinguish an elbow let alone a PWA and is more someone's little red book of Web-Apps.
IMHO if it launches from the Homescreen or Desktop via and icon then it is a Web App.
I'm new to VR development, I am a bit confused what's the differnce and the relationship between Cardboard Sdk and Oculus Sdk, if I want to develop an App which can play 360 VR video or photos, then which one is better I should to choose?
By Oculus SDK, I assume you mean the mobile SDK for GearVR since you mention cardboard. If you're talking about the SDK for PC, then the question is Oculus vs SteamVR vs OpenVR vs Morpheus :)
The major choice for which to develop for I think probably comes down to what your timeline and audience is.
GearVR is the best quality device out there right now and it is SIGNIFICANTLY more polished than cardboard, and it requires specific expensive hardware (Note 4 or S6, soon the Note 5). It has a store that people are buying things off of (even if it's not much yet). But since GearVR apps in development need to be signed, you will only have an audience if you can commit to at least a demo that will be accepted on the Samsung store. (the alternative is to have every user use the developer-signing system, which means you'll get tens of people instead of thousands to see it probably)
Cardboard is a very short-term experience. There are no head-straps on cardboard for a reason - it's intended to be something you hold up for only a minute or two at a time. Most of the audience is people interested in tech demos, but many more people will be able to try out your app. Google is working on stuff behind the scenes, so there may be more meat on it in the future - a non-cardboard VR device I've heard rumors of, and they're pushing cardboard pretty hard for classroom experiences. And in a couple years, every phone MIGHT have sensors good enough to give a GearVR-level experience.
Both SDKs will give you the basic two-eye 3d stereo rendering framework. Oculus' is a little more fleshed out with some built in scene loading (it converts from FBX format which is made by MODO, which is expensive) and a UI library (I'm not very happy with it though).
Either way, most of the work you do will likely be independent of the SDK you use, so I don't think you'll be boxing yourself in whichever one you choose.
Now that unity natively support Virtual Reality you can use both of them in your project but it is a bit tricky.
Have a look at this tutorial that show how to compile for both the Cardboard SDK and the Unity Virtual Reality Supported option:
https://github.com/ludo6577/VrMultiplatform
If it's a web based project a-frame might be all you need.
I was hoping you could point me in the correct direction. I am trying to find an automation tool for an internal Chrome site that I, as a tester, can use to create tests. I would prefer some kind of recording type option and free or very low cost. And it MUST work on Chrome. Our app doesn't work with any other browser
Here's what I've looked at so far:
I am not going to have time to learn any new languages or have access to a developer, so Cucumber is out (this was the company's first choice).
I found the Ghost add-on that records, but it needs to open the firewall to be used. BIG no no.
I looked at sikuli, but we can't have a dedicated screen like that, although it might still be a last ditch option
TestComplete might work, but it costs money. I am going to download the free trial, but the justification may not be enough to get the company to spend the money
SoapUI is something I've worked with before and I know that only the Pro is helpful to a non-programmer like myself.
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks!
You could look at Robot Framework. It is a keyword driven test automation framework and it has good Chrome support via Selenium. Web page has examples how to write tests for browsers.
Robot Framework is open source and free. Writing tests with keywords looks more difficult than using record-playback tool. However, once you have several tests, managing them will be easier with keywords.
We're building a web-based application that requires heavy image processing. We'd like this processing load to be on the client as much as possible and we'd like to support as much platforms (even mobiles) as much as possible.
Yeah, I know, wishful thinking
Here's the info:
Image processing is rasterization from some data. Think like creating a PNG image from a PDF file.
We don't have a lot of server power. So client-side processing is a bit of a must.
So, we're considering:
Flash - most widespread, but from what i read has lackluster development tools. (and no iPhone/iPad support for now).
Silverlight - allows us to use .NET CLR, so a big ++ (a lot of code is in .NET). But is not supported for most mobiles ( rumored android support in the future)
HTML5 + Javascript - probably the most "portable" option. The problem is having to rewrite all that image processing code in Javascript.
Any thoughts or architectures that might help?
Clarification: I don't need further ideas on what libraries are available for Silverlight and Javascript. My dilemma is
choosing Silverlight means no support for most mobiles
choosing Flash means we have to redevelop most of our code AND no iPhone/iPad support
HTML5 + Javascript we have to redevelop most of our code and not fully supported yet in all browsers
choosing two (Silverlight + Flash) will be too costly
Any out-of-the-box or bright ideas / alternatives I might be missing?
This is the sort of issue that software architects run up against all the time. As per usual, there is no ideal solution. You need to select which compromise is most acceptable to your business.
To summarise your problem, most of your image processing software is written in .NET. You'd like to run it client-side on mobile devices, but there is limited .NET penetration on mobiles. The alternatives with higher penetration (eg. Flash) would require you to re-write your code, which you can't afford to do. In addition, these alternatives are not supported on the iPhone/iPad.
What you ideally want is a way to run all your .NET code on most existing platforms, including iPhone/iPad. I can say with some confidence that no such solution currently exists - there is no "silver bullet" answer that you have overlooked.
So what will you need to compromise on? It seems to me that even if you redevelop in flash, you are still going to miss out on a major market (iPhone). And redeveloping software is extremely costly anyway.
Here is the best solution to your problem - you need to compromise on your "client side execution" constraint. If you execute server side, you get to keep your existing code, and also get to deploy to just about every mobile client, including the iPhone.
You said your server power is limited, but server processing power is cheap when compared to software development costs. Indeed, it is not all that expensive to outsource your server component and just pay for what you use. It's most likely that your application will only have low penetration to start off with. As the business grows, you will be able to afford to upgrade your server capacity.
I believe this is the best solution to your problem.
Host you image processing on Amazon E2C, Azure, or Google. IIRC E2C has many common image processing problems packaged and all ready to go.
Azure probably more familiar ground in term of sharing code as a web service
You just pay for CPU cycles and transfers/storage etc
I'm sure there will be Silverlight and JS people posting examples. Here are some image editors written in actionscript:
Phoenix
PhotoshopExpress
There is an ImageProcessing library to start with.
Plus PixelBender is available in Flash Player 10, it's fast, it runs in a separate thread
and people do some pretty mad things with it.
HTH
Some help for the Silverlight part:
There is an Silverlight image editor called Thumba.
And Nokola recently made one called EasyPainter and he will also provide the source code in the furure.
For the image conversion I would recommend the open source library ImageTools that also includes some basic effects.
Silverlight has a class for pixel manipulation of bitmaps called WriteableBitmap. The open source library WriteableBitmapEx is a collection of extension methods for Silverlight's WriteableBitmap. The WriteableBitmap API is very minimalistic and there's only the raw Pixels array for such operations. The WriteableBitmapEx library tries to compensate that with extensions methods that are easy to use like built in methods.
Pixel Shaders can also be used to make some fast and advanced effects. Although they are limited by Shader Model 2 shaders can be used for fast bluring, tinting and such things.
DISCLAIMER: I consider myself as an advocate of the Flash platform. I admire Silverlights huge potential as a technology to deploy almost any .NET content through the browser, but it has low penetration, is horribly marketed and -although perceived as such by many (mostly people who don't know either Flash or Silverlight)- is no competitor of Flash, as much as Flash is no competitor of Sliverlight. The idealist in me loves the idea of doing everything in HTML+JS using a standard, instead of relying on 3rd party proprietary software. But the truth is, JS is slow and the API is limited, and implementations of JS, HTML and CSS are terribly inconsistent accross browsers.
If you really wanna stick to .NET and are so interested in targeting the iPhone and its siblings, then you might wanna check out MonoTouch.
Still, even though this may surprise you, I am going to tell you to use Flash. :)
Why? The image processing bit is the smallest part of your application. Whatever it is you are writing, I am very sure of that. I don't know about Silverlight, but in Flash the filters used by "Thumba" and "EasyPainter" can be created within a day, most of them simply using ConvolutionFilter, ColorMatrixFilter, DisplacementMapFilter and BitmapData::paletteMap or even simply by applying one of the other filters Flash offers out of the box. Any additional things can be created using PixelBender, which was pointed out by George. The kernel language is a subset of C, so porting classic filters shouldn't be too time consuming. Also alchemy (an LLVM backend targeting Flash Player 10) would be an option worth investigating, although it's not very stable yet.
The biggest part of your app will be a lot of GUI design, GUI implementation, Business Logics etc. Flash is really great when it comes to simple, yet reasonably fast image manipulation and with the Flex framework and MXML you have a powerful tool to productively create the GUI of your app, that can interoperate very well with a multitude of server solutions for virtually any platform.
Also, Flash has a great and active community, offering tons of tutorials, code snippets, libraries and frameworks, and a big ecosystem, with cross-compilation tools to deliver flash content to other platforms (including the upcoming Flash CS5, or the mentioned Elips). I don't understand, where you got the impression, that the Flash platform lacks developement tools. The difference to the .NET suite is that they are provided by a multitude of vendors. The upcoming Flash Player 10.1 was already pointed out by George, but never the less, I wanted to stress, that this makes many of the cross-plattform considerations obsolete.
Last but not least, I'd like to point out Haxe. It allows compiling to SWF, but also to C++, using the very same API provided by NME, to target the iPhone. Also there's work in progress on an android backend. If you're aren't playing to launch within the next 4-5 months, then this is definitely an option.
Your issue is a perfect target for the Haxe programming language. Haxe is written for the web and can compile to JavaScript, Flash and Objective-C (possibly Java/.NET soon).
So you do not choose which platform you are going to invest in but in which language. Haxe is easily adoptable for an AcitonScript programmer.
It makes no sense to run your imageprocessing algorithms in a JavaScript sandbox when Flash is available because it will be much faster. It makes also no sense to run heavy image processing algorithms on a mobile device like the iPhone with JavaScript. I would only support JavaScript as the worst fallback solution.
If you do not like to use Haxe I would go with Flash. You can deploy your Flash application for the iPhone aswell if that is your problem. This is also very great because you get native ARM code. There are actually great tools for professional Flash development available. FDT and IntelliJ IDEA are two of them. The best Haxe IDE is probably FlashDevelop at the moment of writing.
So I would definitly not use JavaScript as the only solution. Haxe is perfect for what you try to achieve. If you do not trust or do not want to invest in Haxe you can use Flash because of the iPhone/iPad export.
Depending on your usecase I would also encourage you to look at cloud hosting like Amazon EC2 and Google AppEngine for instance. Hosting costs are cheap and scaling will be easy for your task. The experience will be much better when it comes to complex operations that can take even a lot of time on a desktop system.
In addition to other answers, another option may be a hybrid solution. For example, use Flash/Silverlight for the majority of your target audience and use server-side processing for those that don't support it (or you could create a native app for iP[hone|ad])
You may have to do something like this anyway as the mobiles you are targetting may have insufficient processing power depending how complex your image processing gets.
Of course you still have the option of upgrading your server which, although you've currently discounted, is probably far cheaper than spending development time creating/deploying/testing a client-side solution.
You can use Silverlight for all Silverlight enabled clients and for non Silverlight clients, do the image processing server side. Since the Silverlight code is C#, you can double compile it to make (mostly)the same code work as Silverlight and non-Silverlight (i.e. server). This gets you the best of both worlds.
You don't say what language "all that code" you'd have to rewrite is in. Might a semiautomated translation to Javascript be practical?
Perhaps you could start out server-side, as CraigS suggests, and then move functions into the client over time instead of rewriting all at once.
Have you checked the editor of Pixlr.com ?
Take a look at their API as well..
The best solution is to use silverlight (so you already have the code ready). If the client can't run it (mobile phones, etc) then process it server-side.
It's the best compromise.
Depends on the type of image processing and the end user experience you are targeting.
As you are looking to target mobile phones your image processing will need to take into consideration the type of handset the user or the receipient has (if messaging via SMS/MMS), as different handsets have different resolution screens and handle different image formats for main images and thumbnails.
I'd suggest that you consider a hybrid cloud architecture as was mentioned in the Microsoft PDC keynotes this year. This would enable you to have your own server(s) to support your application, but if you require additional capacity due you scale out into the cloud using AppFabric.
Additionally, to maximise the market availability of your product pulling the image processing to a common reusable infrastructure allows you to target different platforms, exploiting the positives in each.
I have worked on a solution that hosted its image processing and delivery infrastructure server side and then built different UI offerings allowing sales via desktops, MNOs and AppStores. It can work and from a business perspective can offer economies of scale benefits.
Why not mention Java Applet ?
Good sides are:
almost all browser support ?
need install JRE ?
all OS support
Java provide Java Advanced Image kits, but if c++ dll can be called, that is best (JNI can call c++ dll )
In Python, one of the most popular libraries for image processing is pillow. Through the pyodide project (python running inside browser via emscripten), it's possible to use libraries like pillow and numpy for image (or matrix) processing, and convert the output to a base64 string (via Python standard library). This can then be passed to your <img> html element, either native JS document or with a library like React.
The way I see it, there's no one solution that meets all of your needs. Your best option, imo, is to go with Flash and hope that Adobe sets an agreement with Apple to get Flash on the iPhone/iPad. The major downside, of course, is you'll have to rewrite much of your code.
If the mobile sector isn't absolutely critical, then choose the Silverlight option for reasons you mentioned already. You could also use Silverlight in an out-of-browser mode to work as a desktop application.
i've been making web app's and working with various server side language like php, ruby, perl for a while now. I've always been curious about game development, it's actually what I set out to do but I ended up in web development. I am trying to transition in to GD, but I cannot help see games from a web development POV.
GD = Game Development
WD = Web Development
Technical Questions.
How do you design UI in games? in WD you have CSS, and need minimal graphics to create a quick menu. are there similar tools or concepts in GD ?
How do you deal with storing data ? Do you use flat text files? Or is there something like MySQL or sqlite that you use to store information about objects, users, and etc ?
What game engines is commonly used ? Are there any that use scripting languages ? I only know VB and basic understanding of C.
With the proliferation of Iphone and Android, is J2ME being phased out for mobile phones ?
open 3D web is coming. What is your thoughts on having 3d applications running natively from your browser ?
What tools make it easy for creating 3D objects, levels, game environment, and animating characters and so on ?
Where can I find out more about how server/client, client/client, and MMORPG networking works ?
Where can I get or find generic or commonly used game flows ? for multiplayer ?
How do you deal with physics? Is there freely available algorithm or library that you can use ?
How are real time cutscenes made in games ?
Market Questions.
Which market should you enter? Mobile, iphone, wii, PSP, DS, android , ps3, PC etc.
Shouldn't you always enter mobile market, as it is easy to make small games on your own yet sell a lot ? Are there any resources where i can find more about each markets ?
What is your thought on Steam content distribution ? Is it the distribution model of the future ? Whats wrong with the traditional publisher/distributor model ? How does the traditional model work exactly ?
How big is the web games market? ex) Flash games.
How is game development different from any other software development or web development ?
I have a lot more....but those are the ones that I have been thinking about lately.
Thank you very much for reading !
UI Development
Depends on the game- is it animated, or a board-style game? Generally, UI assets are created as images, sprites, or storyboards.
Data
Again, depends on the game type. Realtime games need FAST access, so you want to store your data in a local database and cache it as much as possible. Local file-based databases tend to be the norm, either custom or off-the-shelf, such as SQLLite.
Engines
There are tons of engines out there for 3D, board, etc. Popcap has made their C++ game engine open source. Others include Unity, Ogre3D...
J2ME
I wouldn't target this platform for games.
Don't know much about "Open 3D Web" but it sounds very browser-dependent, so mileage may vary across browsers.
You can play with 3D with Google Sketchup and Caligari Truespace. Truespace was bought by Microsoft and made free.
Again, tons of engines out there for networking. Example: Microsoft's XNA framework has some networking bits you can leverage.
Not sure what you mean there.
There are physics engines built into some of the gaming engines I've mentioned, and external ones you can use.
Once upon a time, realtime custscenes were pre-rendered with 3D Studio Max or Maya. These days in-game rendering is often good enough for cutscenes: look at the latest Halo 3:ODST game. All cutscenes use the in-game engine.
Market
I looked into game development earlier this year. Casual games look to me like a growth industry- high volume, relatively low development cost. Big Fish Games for the PC is a good example there- they publish a few titles and resell most.
I think mobile game development is a huge potential market but the barriers to entry are high because it will be a crowded space. iPhone games are the 800lb gorilla but Android is coming up. PSP and others have a limited audience and are notoriously difficult.
The most important thing I learned in my research is that game development is a labor of love. It's hugely multi-disciplinary: you need programming, art, concept, production. It's more like making a movie than anything else. It's also rough to make a profit because of all that overhead. If you want to get into it, I recommend joining a game developer to learn the business. Once you have experience you can carry it forward to larger gigs at larger publishers. Eventually you can get to work on a major AAA title, after which you can really write your own ticket.
I'll stick to answering the technical questions:
1 - UIs are usually completely bespoke, with nothing resembling a standard in the same way that HTML/CSS is a web development standard. Some people use ScaleForm which is based on Flash but that is by no means common.
2 - Data is often stored in flat files - rarely text, more commonly binary. Again, these are almost always completely bespoke formats. Sometimes they are aggregated into archive files which use the zip format or something similar however. Occasionally, some programs might use sqlite, and online games often use SQL databases.
3 -There are many game engines used, although the definition of 'common' is vague. There are well-known ones like the Unreal or Source engines, down to lesser known ones like Panda3D or Torque. Some of these are heavily focused on 3D and leave much of the rest of the functionality to other packages (or the game developer themselves). Most are able to be used with scripting languages, or come with one built-in. (eg. UnrealScript).
4 - J2ME - couldn't say, that's not the sector I work in.
5 - 3D web will be interesting when it's ready, but cutting edge games currently require gigabytes of client-side data. Running the application in the browser doesn't get around that download, so it's not a great benefit. Nor is it likely to be as high performing as a dedicated 3D game renderer for quite some time. So while it opens many doors, it doesn't significantly change the state of play for gaming just yet.
6 - 3D art assets are usually made with 3D Studio Max or Maya, although there are several other related tools.
7 - MMORPG networking firstly requires understanding of basic networking (ie. strip away all the HTTP fluff and get right down to the socket level). Start with Beej, work up. From there, you're best off reading talks given at conferences and reading the Massively Multiplayer Game Development books, coupling that with anything you can find on traditional game networking. 2 good starting points are the Source Multiplayer Networking docs, and Gaffer's Networking for Games Programmers. Don't expect to understand everything the first time you read it, either. And bear in mind this is a field with ongoing research and the problems are far from solved yet. And that it's also a field where "if you have to ask, you can't do it yet". Emphasis on yet.
8 - I don't know what you mean by game flow - it's not a term I've heard used before.
9 - There are several physics libraries available, including Havok, ODE, Bullet, PhysX, Box2D, etc. Some are free, some are not. You can also write your own physics for simple games, as it's not all that hard, and indeed that is what everybody did until relatively recently.
10 - Real time cutscenes are typically either pre-animated in something like 3D Studio Max, or scripted to run within the game engine.
It depends very much on the platform you are developing for. some game engines, or platforms, have built in platform specific means of creating UI systems. An example is developing for the 360 where there is a proprietary UI system provided with the SDK tools.
However, systems like these tie you to a particular platform and this can be undesirable.
Another alternative is cross platform libraries like Scaleform, which provide game-side libraries for displaying UI elements, and a common way of editing and creating UI systems across different platforms.
The complexity of UIs in videogames varies wildly. Look at something like Peggle, compared to something like Codemaster's Dirt or EA's Dead Space. Each system is therefore implemented differently.
Some use 3D packages and the standard game engine to animate and render UIs. Others implement Flash. Others roll their own custom solutions. There's no easy choice or a standard like CSS I'm afraid!
Hope this helps,
-Tom