I am in the process of creating the iOS version of a hybrid Cordova app which uses one single in-house plugin. The plugin provides the app with a range of services.
an encrypted SQLite database via SQLCipher
geolocation tracking
watching for Wifi networks (not actually using them, I only care about their MAC ids)
asynchronous https POST to periodically transfer app status data to my servers. I originally used OKHTTP for this purpose but now rely solely on the native APIs provided by Android.
Websockets (I am using this implementation in Android largely because it is very well documented)
Android's CountDownTimer to reguarly update the app screen when it is in the foreground
The accelerometer sensor to keep track of linear acceleration changes and the number of steps since last reboot.
Storing some information in files
Mostly using Android SharedPreferences to keep track of the app state
I would rate myself as a fairly decent programmer and have coded in C/C#/Delphi/C++ at various times in the past though most of my current experience has been with Java/ES6 and PHP. I have taken a look at Cordova's instructions for creating iOS plugins. What surprises me slightly is that a good 3+ years after Swift was introduced the Cordova folk still say
An iOS plugin is implemented as an Objective-C class that extends the CDVPlugin class. For JavaScript's exec method's service parameter to map to an Objective-C class, each plugin class must be registered as a tag in the named application directory's config.xml file.
I have used Evothing's excellent guide to install the entire Cordova ecosystem on my Mac Mini and have tested out the "Echo" sample app in the Cordova documentation. Much to my surprise I was able to test the app on my local iOS device at just my second attempt. However, this is purely the result of copying and pasting the sample Cordova Echo app code. Much of the Objective C syntax makes little sense to me and I note that it appears to use pointers (lots of *s) from which I am inferring that there is no automated garbage collection.
My questions
Are there well documented iOS APIs for handling geolocation, wifi scanning, file i/o etc as I have listed above?
Am I obliged to do all of this in Objective C or is it now possible to create Cordova iOS plugins in Swift (which appears to have a flatter learning curve)
Is it possible to use Websockets in this environment? If so, is there a comprehensive native iOS implementation?
Are there any shortcut ways to convert my Android/Java plugin code for use on iOS?
Finally, in view of the capabilities that I need to port, are there any glaringly obvious gotchas that I need to be aware of before I start
I am assuming that the iOS webview is based on Safari and accepts most CSS3/HTML5/ES6 constructs so the process of porting the UI - which works without a hitch in the Android Webview which shares it codebase with Chrome.
I'd be much obliged to anyone who might be able to give me some pointers here.
Related
I'm on a bit of new ground here and perhaps this is a repost (if so>sorry).
I need some pointers on which direction to go. I have previously made an android app and found myself using most dev time on the UI. I wish to design the UI with HTML5 and distribute it to android and iOS .
I researched a lot about native and hybrid in order to focus my effort. Came across a bunch of platforms like PhoneGap, Appcelerator, Trigger.io and AppGyver (found the latter two appealing). But now I'm confused...
I basically wish to to make an intraweb environment that allows a team to develop HTML5 content that feeds data into a database while keeping the development and database under strict version control.
Thinking of such a setup
Local server hosting the source HTML5 code and database(s) - git upstream.
Development is then done by git on desktop computers
The mobile/tablets pulls the source (git origin) and creates instances that pull request the data entries to upstream (and thereby all other remotes)
Multiple units can work on the same instance and contribute to pull request data to the origin. They see changes right away (logic should assure no conflicts - thinking of pinging the devices)
No need to distribute new app via app stores if some new html5 is added (no behavior changed so no manifest violated).
Currently I'm considering making a native app that has a webview and performs git commands, but I'm fearing that I will get stuck (have no iOS programming experience). Is this overkill?
I'm not at all against the hybrid suppliers - just wondering if they will let me achieve what I aim for.
If anyone has some links to online tutorials on how to archive similar task or can provide usefull hints/pointers then I would appreciate it.
I'll upvote all answers that helped me and set the solution for the one that helped me most.
I worked some years with web technology packed into native apps. You have to consider two things.
First, your app will be just a simple HTML page or it will have fancy UIs, very dynamic UI interaction and animations? If it is complex and very dynamic, stick with native apps. The main advantage of them is the performance, it is VERY superior to WebView packaged apps in HTML5.
Second, the WebView have MANY usage restrictions. It is not like the Chrome browser that you use in your phone/tablet. Too fancy operations will likely have problems with WebView, and the extra time you've spent constructing UIs you will spend working around very annoying little problems.
Another concern, using git bundled in your app will be hard to integrate with the WebView due to its sandbox restrictions. I surely would not recommend to go that way. If you don't use the native phone hardware, like camera and others, you can show in the WebView a remote HTML5 site. It is a much more simple and secure option.
Another thing to note. These packing JavaScript libraries have different objectives. The Cordova (PhoneGap extends this with some Adobe powered features) goal is to make available to your JS code the native phone features, it has nothing to do with UI. The Ionic that was mentioned is focused on UI development. There are other libraries that are focused on UI and are used with PhoneGap/Cordova. My suggestion for fancy and dynamic UIs using HTML5 based technology is the Sencha Touch framework, that is bundled in ExtJS 6 now. Although they are paid framework and require advanced Javascript programming. The learning curve is very big.
Concluding, if your goal is faster UI development and the apps are simple, you can go with Cordova and another UI-focused framework. But I suggest to forget the complicated Git "on-the-fly" app update. If your app uses many native features and has very complex and big UIs, stick to native due to performance.
Another thing to note, well developed native apps consumes (in most cases) much less network bandwidth and battery lifetime.
I hope these informations help you =)
I might suggest looking into Ionic, it is a quote:
Powerful HTML5 SDK that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Ionic is focused mainly on the look and feel, and UI interaction of your app. That means we aren't a replacement for PhoneGap or your favorite Javascript framework. Instead, Ionic simply fits in well with these projects in order to simplify one big part of your app: the front end. We recommend reading Where does the Ionic Framework fit in? to get a good understanding of Ionic's goals.
Ionic currently requires AngularJS in order to work at its full potential. While you can still use the CSS portion of the framework, you'll miss out on powerful UI interactions, gestures, animations, and other things.
What I get from this is that Ionic integrates with PhoneGap.
I'm not sure how well this will help, but I think it will be useful in your search.
PhoneGap - Is as of yet, the single most comprehensive suite that allows you to leverage HTML, CSS and Javascript in a way that will give you the ability to have a single source solution and publish to the mobile landscape.
Using your scenario:
Create your application in local Webserver (Intranet)
Utilize the PhoneGap API to improve data access and UI.
Publish to GIT/SVN for versioning
Build with PhoneGap (Build Service - a cloud service that takes the zip of source code and then you choose your platform)
Publish as Private/Public to the Device Target (IOS, Android, WPhone)
In this way your HTML5 Application and your Published/Packaged App on the Devices you chose would be identical; and the WebApp and DeviceApp will remain in synch.
Useful PhoneGap Tutorials:
PhoneGap Tutorial 1
PhoneGap Tutorial 2
Can Nativescript build apps for web as well?
As Ionicframework and similar uses Cordova to build Android and iOS the same code there can be served by an HTTP server to the mobile or desktop browsers.
Will that be possible with the apps built with Nativescript, using same code base for web version of the app?
Nowadays Angular integration is on the way, and using Angular for the mvc kind of things (like data bindings, events etc.) and using Native for the device apis, platform apis and native gui would help in an unequaled way.
Angular parts can be used in the browser as well when built for it. What to do with the xml written for the gui templates in Nativescript, they could be converted to proper html for web built of the app, as Nativescript itself already uses a unified gui api for different platforms, that could be possible. And lastly, native calls made in NativeScript would be ignored in the web build.
It would be great to build for Android, iOS, and Web with the same exact code base.
tl;dr: No
Longer: The big difference between the Cordova/Phonegap based technologies (such as Ionic and Supersonic) and the Dynamic Runtime based technologies (such as NativeScript, React Native and Titanium) is that the first uses a HTML approach where the application is run by WebKit/Blink in a WebView. Looking on the Dynamic Runtime technologies there's no HTML Engine running your app, but rather native views and widgets. The framework (in this case NativeScript) is "just" a bridge between Javascript and the native language of the device.
However, depending of how you architecture your code, you can create Javascript which will be usable in both a NativeScript environment as well as in a browser environment.
Edit: The above means that you could reuse some of your code. There'll still be NativeScript specific code.
Edit2: There's an ongoing project to enable usage of Angular 2 in NativeScript. Please see current status in the issue: https://github.com/NativeScript/NativeScript/issues/103 Also note that the Telerik NativeScript core developer Valentin Stoychev is saying
The idea [is] to enable as much code reuse as possible between your web and mobile apps.
So: Yes on code reuse - no on exact same codebase.
Adding to the (correct) response of Emil - I do not think it is possible to have any significant portion of the app shared (even for the logic part) since {N} apps mostly utilize the Nativscript observable implementation which would probably 'leak' into your models / view models.
Having said that, I suggest you to monitor the work happening on integrating Angular2, which would probably mean a larger code sharing potential (with Angular2 web apps)
I figured this would be an easy answer to find, however, I haven't had much luck.
I've heard of services such as Phonegap and others where the developer can develop a web app and it gets wrapped and deployed to the Windows, iOS and Android platforms. However, is there a method that you can build native to Java/Android and then wrap it to run on another mobile device platforms?
Using Google's java2objc code conversion tool you can generate Objective C code from Java code. Google has used it to generate ~40% of the code used in their new email app Inbox so it's a reasonably proven technology.
With that said, it will not generate any UI related code nor should it be, as each platform has its own UI standard. What it can do is to allow you to write the business logic once and reused it for iOS.
I ended up discovering the ionic framework found here. I found it the best (and by far the easiest) route to go for cross platform development. It uses angularJS and web based implementation that wraps content for ios, android, blackberry and windows mobile devices.
I am new to PhoneGap, and I have several questions:
I need a way to develop an application that will have iOS, Android, and other platform compatibility. In other words, I want to write 1 app and get compatibility versions for different platforms.
By reading the "Get Started" guide linked by the PhoneGap website, I found there are different procedures for different platforms. So to have compatibility versions across platforms, do I have to go one-by-one and change all of them if I make a modification to my app?
Also, what exactly is PhoneGap Build? It seems like I can avoid all that hassle mentioned previously and toss my app into the PhoneGap Build? Do I really not have to do anything besides writing the app? What if I need to make changes?
And finally, I've read that PhoneGap works with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but not PHP. What if my app needs to contact a server? Can PhoneGap handle that?
Thank you for bearing with all these questions!
PhoneGap achieves platform compatibility by embedding a webview within your application. Therefore you can apply your knowledge in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and it additionally provides ways to interact with native features (e.g. camera, gps, ...).
With PhoneGap you write one general web app, tweak parts for the specific platform (sometimes you do not have to this at all) and build it for that platform. The latter can be handled with PhoneGap Build service: It takes your webapp and bundles it for the mobile operating systems out there (Embeds it within a Java app on Android, an Objective-C app on iOs)
PhoneGap is able to communicate with a server hosting a PHP script just as every other web application. Trying to dynamically load resources from remote sites can be quite a hassle but this is another question.
traumalles is correct. All your HTML/Javascript/CSS is running from within a webview on the device. Your code is, therefore, all "client-side." You can communicate with a server just like with any other page. When they say PhoneGap isn't compatible with PHP, they mean only that PhoneGap can't execute PHP code like it's a server, because it's not. It's just loading your webapp in, basically, a browser.
One other important question is what exactly do you mean with "other platforms" phonegap does provide many functionality for nearly every platform but the different webbrowser of the mobile devices have their problems and limitations.
For example are there many problems if you want to provide your application on a WindowsPhone Device because the Webbrowser has a few limitations which will cause your app to not look and behave like a native app.
Just look a bit through the phonegap API you will see that some functions are just available for IOS or for Android and there are a few only Blackberry methods and so on.
So you really have to be careful when a framework tells you it will work on all devices.
So i really don't have a problem with phonegap i worked with it very great but there will be limitations you have to deal with.
If you primarily want to develop for IOS and Android you can really achieve great native like results !
I have been looking at appcelerator it seems pretty fine! Without a doubt, one of the advantages of appcelerator is its support for multi-platform. I am interested in building an android app and maybe a iphone app later on. So it is not crucial to support multiple platforms at the moment.
If you disregard supporting multiple platforms and just focus on android development. Is appcelerator still advantageous? Does it lack any features of "Android sdk"?
(When I say "Andorid sdk" I mean development with Eclipse with native Android sdk, if it makes any sense)
We looked at Appcelerator when starting our Android project. We knew we would have to do an iOS client next, so Appcelerator was enticing.
We decided not to go that route because it doesn't support all the native features of each device.
For example, we decided early on that our user interface in Android would need a widget. No support for that in Appcelerator, as it's specific to Android. [This was a few months back -you may want to check again].
Compromising on the user interface was too much for us. We decided to go with C/C++ for the app logic and use Android SDK for the user interface.
Our apps now have two pieces: C/C++ as much as possible to the "brains" and the native (Android/Cocoa Touch) for the UI to take advantage of the UI experience.
Works of course for platforms that can integrate C/C++.
The parting advice: design your user interface first, then find a tool that can implement it. Users have high expectations of the UI in portable devices. Compromising on it early on may be the KOD for your project.
[EDIT] Every so often I see an upvote for this question. I would like to update with what we learned in the past two years:
Using C/C++ for the common parts of our application has paid off. It does require a slightly more complicated build process, but the savings are gigantic if the piece of code being shared is complex (as in our case).
For the user interface piece we are beginning to look into hybrid apps (some UI elements in HTML). There are still debates out there about HTML interfaces (Facebook and LinkedIn are two that move to native code for the UI), but also some reports that when chosen carefully it works. There is a great talk from Flipoard on that; with slides here.
UPDATE Oct/2014
In March/2014 Smashing Magazine published an excellent article comparing native iOS, native Android, PhongeGap (Cordova) and Appcelerator Titanium. They show the development of a simple app in each environment.
This is the last part of the series. At the top of this part there are links to the previous parts of the series and at the bottom there is the comparison of the approaches. There are also interesting comments from readers at the end.
UPDATE May/2015
Still get an upvote for this question every so often, so I would like to share what we have done since I wrote the first part of the answer.
We are now working on a project that also has a web client. We have now the iOS client, the Android client, plus the web client.
JavaScript is the natural choice for the web client.
Since we want to share as much code (at the business logic layer) across these clients, it means we need to find a way to run the JavaScript code in iOS and Android.
And that's what we ended up doing.
This is a summary of how we handle it:
For all clients: all data structures are defined with Google's protobuf. This allows to automatically generate the serialization/deserialization code for iOS and Android.
iOS: run the JavaScript code with the help of JavaScriptCore (a good overview here).
Android: run the JavaScript code with the help of Google's V8 engine.
The bridge between JavaScript and the iOS/Android layer can be a bottleneck, especially the serialization of the objects. We had to optimize a few things and learned a few lessons to stay out of trouble.
Generally the experience has been positive. We saved significant amount of time by sharing the code across all clients.
If I had to start another project like this one (that requires sharing code with web and mobile clients), I would also take a look at what Google did for inbox. It wasn't available when we started. Looks promising.
UPDATE August/2015
And the world keeps turning...
I would also take a good look at React Native if I had to start a new mobile app now.
It's based on JavaScript, bridging web and mobile development more easily.
There is a great tutorial in Ray Wenderlich's site.
UPDATE February 2016
My shortlist for cross-platform development is down to two:
ionic
React Native
I've been paying more attention to ionic because our web app uses AngularJS and so does ionic (Cordova + AngularJS). React Native will force the team to learn another framework (of course the argument is the opposite if your web app uses React).
Nevertheless, I'd seriously consider React Native, even having to learn another framework, because of the reported performance and look-and-feel of the app. From React Native's site:
With React Native, you can use the standard platform components such
as UITabBar on iOS and Drawer on Android
If you are starting now, I recommend you take the time to at a minimum complete their tutorials so you get a better feeling of each framework. Each tutorial can be complete in one to two hours:
ionic tutorial
React Native tutorial
For a simpler approach: Smashing Magazine just published (at the time I wrote this update) a good article showing how to use the native navigation elements to make the app feel (well...) native, while using web views to render the content. The article goes into the details of how to make the HTML/CSS usable in the mobile devices (it's not just pushing the HTML/CSS you already have).
If you only focus on develop apps for Android platform, I recommend you should use native Android (Eclipse + Android SDK as you said) instead Titanium.
Reason: Titanium is suitable if
You want to develop apps quicly, or
Your apps is simple, or
You see Java is so difficult (maybe :p ), so you choose the easier (Javascript of Titanium).
And here is the reasons why you should use native Android instead Titanium:
You want to develop a complex app, or
You want to customize app appearance. It's very important. Imaging you make an app for client, and they need their app to be customized for more eye-catching. Choosing Titanium means you must use their control, which lacks of ability to customize. It'd be better if using native Android that you can customize everything you want.
that is a very difficult question to answer without any specifics regarding the requirements of the application.
I would suggest you take a quick look at the API documentation of Appcelerator to see what the framework provides and also take a moment to list the basic requirements of your application and then determine what tool will be best for your project.
I think you are onto a good start using Appcelerator, since it uses JavaScript, etc. Easy to learn, but good examples. It will also enable you to use the same code and reach iPhone,iPad apps. Learning to use just the Android SDK is more complicated. Even then you still need to develop later iPhone etc apps. If you come from a web background this makes sense. There are good video's for quick learning. Good Luck
My experiences with Appcelerator seem to suggest they are more of an iOS shop. Their toolset for Android is, IMHO, quite lacking. ADT supports visual UI building and debugging on device, which Titanium Studio does not. There has been a bug filed about this for several months now, and it continues to be delayed. If your focus is Android, use Google ADT or MOTODEV Studio for Android. These IDEs are quite nice and are used by professionals.
The above answer presents a great way to develop mobile apps. DO NOT COMPROMISE ON A HIGH-QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE.
Lacking of bluetooth support is a huge deficiency for Appcelerator and no one gives a clue about roadmap.
edit : appcelerator now have BT support in Tizen 3.1
Well, in the new version of appcelerator (APPCELERATORSTUDIO 4.0) you can have alloy projects, and something like css files for your UI (tss), so in fact they are really customizable.
Greatings
Appcelerator has a lot of support and it really easy to use. It supports 100% of native api calls now. They have really good documentation too.