I would like to ask for some advice on this issue I am having. I am working on a website that is made with ruby on rails (along with html.slim, css, angular.js).
I would like to create an Android (and, if possible also iOS/Windows Phone) app to access a part of this website.
The website does nothing more than making some api calls to a server and it's really light, so I think that I don't need to make a native app. I would like to make this app in the fastest and easiest way possible. I thought that I would be able to make convert the site using Phonegap, but this would work if it was made only with html,css and js, not also with ruby on rails. The only thing I need is to store a small string on the device (the website stores a cookie) and then to make a few simple API calls.
Thank you for any advice on this - not so clever - question.
Bye!
PhoneGap, Cordova, Ionic, etc. - all the same. None of them will run your API (aka server side code - PHP, Ruby, .NET) without doing something dramatic.
Easiest approach - write server side services (e.g. REST services) using your favorite server side code - like Ruby, and use JS to securely call into those services.
This fits the PhoneGap/Cordova/Ionic paradigm, and will allow you to build a hybrid app (aka seemingly native app) the quickest.
Just my 2 cents.
Maybe (if you need real simple app for mobile platforms) you should create Android/iOS app with browser object inside app who will be receiving html data from your public website and show it for user. You just need to create mobile layouts in your rails application.
pros:
You can create this app real quickly;
Easy for update;
Don't need to update app if something changed in general web application layouts or logic.
When you create layouts for mobile they will be work for your applications and for mobile devices who doesn't use your app.
cons:
This is not classic application, it just browser inside your app.
It is not a bad solution for start. For most sites, and projects it will be enough.
More information about rails and mobile layouts for rails you can find here:
http://railscasts.com/episodes/199-mobile-devices
Example how looks like android app with browser (Webview) object:
http://www.mkyong.com/android/android-webview-example/
https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/webview/gettingstarted
I'm sorry if this is not the answer you were looking for.
Related
I have no idea how does applications like Amazon, Flipkart etc work. They have both android application and website. How does data between both web and Android synchronise?
Do we write separate codes for building android app and website? If yes then in what language we build the website so that it's compatible with the android application.
And how to build the database for the same.
If answer is no to the above question, then how exactly do we proceed to build such Android and web application.
I am new to this and want to learn how to build it.
In general, web sites are built with web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, but there a many different frameworks and libraries in other languages (such as Angular, which is written in TypeScript) that can also handle the creation of web apps. In comparison, mobile applications for Android and iOS are written it Java/Kotlin or C#/Swift, respectively. There isn't really a clean, native way to create a single app for web and mobile platforms. But, the data that backs both of the platforms is the same.
How does this work? The data is hosted on what is called a backend, a server that has the information that you want to display to your users. Typically, the client app can get this information with an HTTP request to the backend, and the response will be the data formatted in a JSON string. Data is stored in the backend in a database. There are many databases in use today, but some more popular ones are MySQL, MongoDB, and SQLite, and each of them have their advantages and disadvantages. As you get further along in your development cycle, you will need to choose the tools that work for you.
Websites (and relative applications) like Amazon have very complicated systems behind what you see on the screen. Of course they have different code for either application and website. Usually, in small projects, you can create the mobile android app with languages like Java or Kotlin and websites with html, css and Javascript. But when it comes to get together data between an app and a website, you will need to write backend software, which is not so easy, for example in php and then create a database to store the data (with mySQL for example). Then you can access your data from either app and website and decide what to do with it. I suggest you to learn one of these technologies at a time. Trying to learn them all together will only create misunderstandings.
Hope I've been useful.
I want to build some kind of multi-user blog that should mainly be used via smartphone but CAN be used at a pc/mac too. I want it to be stored in the iOS and Android AppStores, so just a webapp with mobile-view option doesn't seem right to me. Now my question. Whats the best option to start with? Create the webapp first to get the backend, databases and stuff and than write the native app that gets access to that databases? Or start with native app first and just build a simple webapp that gets access to the native app backend? Or maybe write the webapp with mobile view option and just write a simple native app that uses the UIWebView to show the mobile version of my webbapp? I hope this question is not too confusing^^
P.S. I decided to go for ruby on rails for the webapp and store that stuff on amazon aws ;)
P.S.2 How much is the UI of a native app customizable e.g. TableViews etc? Because implementing WebApp via UIWebView may be the more stylish option?
greetz
Look, Native UI will have quite good performance event on old Android devices,
but it requires some development effort to work with Android SDK. On another had you can create some hybrid webapp using Phonegap, but you shoud keep keep in mind that you may have some performance problems with slow-slow android's web view.
As for me blog app could be implemented with lightweight JS/HTML5, but in this case please don't use Jquery/ jQuery mobile - they are extremly slow, and I experienced huge performance degradation.
Is there any way of developing a mobile app as a self contained Rails/Ruby app?
The idea is to develop in Rails using the normal tools (browser, thin/WEBrick and command line) and then add the Rails app folder to a specially created Android/iOS app, from where it will be compiled to a native executable. This would be similar to the current PhoneGap creation process I guess. I know about RubyMotion but its iOS only, and its not completely Rails anyway.
Does anything like this exist currently?
What would you need to do this? Obviously you need to run a local webserver of some kind.. Do you need to run an entire stack (Apache, Ruby and Rails) inside the native app or could you take shortcuts (like JRuby for Android for example)?
What is your gut feel on how this would perform?
Any thoughts welcome.
EDIT
Gems are probably going to be a BIG issue as well.
Does anything like this exist currently?
Rhodes is in the ballpark, but it is not Rails and (last I checked) cannot use gems. It does, however, have you build so-called hybrid apps using a Rails-ish controller pattern, with partials and all that.
Obviously you need to run a local webserver of some kind
Not necessarily, and it would be an poor idea to do so for security reasons. Hybrid apps, such as Rhodes, have a Web presentation layer (WebView) displaying the HTML content generated by the back-end, without an HTTP stack.
What is your gut feel on how this would perform?
On many devices, I suspect that your app would crash on startup for having run out of memory. On the rest, I would expect mediocre performance, simply because Rails is not particularly svelte.
The strange thing is that you want to use web application as mobile application. Is there a reason to use Rails instead of just Ruby (then you have Ruboto on Android). My opinion that HTML5(+ local storage) is enough to serve mobile part and use API from somewhere on the web.
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 !
My goal is to replicate my CouchDB to Android to allow offline access & reduced latency.
I watched this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RdcKWYGqig
One fundamental point I don't get is:
Does CouchDB replication work only
for Android Applications?
Or, can it work for a web application
running in the Android browser (this
is what I am shooting for)? If so, how?
you would need to install the CouchDB software on the Android device in order to get it to work.
Once that is installed, the user can visit your app via the browser at http://localhost:5984/path/to/my/app
You could create one of those bookmarks that looks like an app, and point it to the local couch url.
Chris
Ofcourse you can create browser based applications.
Either try creating a couchapp and loading it with the browserview in android or club it with something like Sencha to wrap it around and making it a hybrid native web app!
If you know how to create couchapps, then it should be pretty straight forward, else, take a look into how to create simple couchapps. Ofcourse, i'm going under the assumption that you already know a bit of Android!