I'd like to know if it's a way to write a mobile application which can purchase products through OpenCart website. Here are two possible methods I can think of. Please suggest which one is better or if there is another better way:
OMF - OpenCart mobile framework. I guest it's just a theme for the open cart website. Is it possible to run this inside PhoneGap ?
OpenCart Restful API. We can build the native UI in mobile application. But if there are any limitations?
I'll appreciate if anybody who have experience to build the open cart website for the mobile application advise. Thank you so much.
I shall answer because I was working on somewhat similar project before. Your suggested solutions first.
1] Using phonegap you develop hybrid mobile apps which run on webview on respected mobile platforms. And I don't recommend this method because what it does is renders the exact website DOM in mobile's webview and it will get rejected by Apple since they won't allow this due to native design guidelines consistency. So, unless you are only targeting Android users, forget this option.
2] Building native mobile app is preferable. However I should give you a heads-up that Opencart has prewritten APIs for Orders, customers, shipping, vouchers etc but not for products. You will have to manually write it.
I can't figure out what limitations you are referring. Obviously, in a mobile app the desktop version extensions won't work. the requirement mentioned in the first line of question can certainly be meet using API with native development.
Related
I am sorry if this is not the correct place to ask these questions but I cannot find the answer anywhere. I have built/building an app that basically displays a leaflet map and tracks users in real time with node and socket.io It has various functions but everything is contained either on or over the map. What I need to know is.
Will this run properly in a WebView app?
Can it run when the app is on but in the background (This has to run to keep the connection open and update location with the watch.position function)?
Can it access the HTML5 location features?
Can I access things like if I want to send a SMS from it via a button on the webapp?
Can I access the camera?
Whats the quickest software to use to develop this and could a similar app be made for iOS?
Sorry if a lot of questions but from what I have read WebView should be good enough as most of the work is back-end and map/browser based anyway. Or should I go down the native route?
I have done a couple of cross platform apps for iOS and Android with Cordova. To answer your questions: In a nutshell, I think you can do most of what you are trying to do with a framework like Cordova.
No.
Not with the webview, but maybe with Cordova (there is a plugin for background services).
Not with the webview, but yes with Cordova.
Not with the webview, but yes with Cordova.
Not with the webview, but yes with Cordova.
I am now a native developer for both iOS and Android. I would probably not do an app cross platform again unless it was really simple. I was always able to make things work in Cordova, but with a lot of hacking involved. Since you are familiar with javascript/html Corodova or Phonegap would probably be fastest in terms of development time for you.
I am planning to build a survey style questionnaire app that will run on android devices. I am not too keen on creating Android apps and recently came across PWA framework of Google.
Can anyone suggest if this is an ideal solution to build an offline survey style questionnaire app, the requirement is users will download a new questionnaire before going in field which would have different set of questions and choices and will take responses that could be around 100-500 per questionnaire in offline mode and they will come back to office and connect with internet and sync with central database.
My question is whether PWA can provide this offline feature and more importantly how much space is provided for a PWA to use on devices, is the space limited to couple of MB's like the Microsoft MVC solution?
Thanks,
Anurag
Regarding offline capabilities:
You can use service workers for such requirement. If you are only targeting modern devices with updated browsers, offline capabilities shouldn't be a problem.
Regarding Storage:
You can either leverage web storage API or indexedDB. In either case, you may read: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-research/ to know the limits for each. Actual answer depends on platform and browser.
If you are only targeting mobile app and can take care of app distribution you can also consider Ionic for developing a hybrid app.
http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/
Also, check out:
https://github.com/pazguille/offline-first : Everything you need to know to create offline-first web apps.
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.
So what I want to do is, "develop" an app where it main purpose is just to open a website. I need that on android and ios. Is there an online website to do just that?
I jused to know a website, where you could develop for various platforms (PHP, Java, Object C for iOs) and even test your code online.
Somehow I can't find it anywhere. Thank in advance if you can either show me the website again or find me a new website to do just that.
Regards!
Update:
Found the website: http://www.programmr.com/
I think you're referencing PhoneGap.
PhoneGap allows you to build native applications using HTML/CSS/JS for all mobile operating systems.
If all you want is for your iPhone App and Android App to open up a website "inside" of the application, you will want to use a webView. This will allow you to have your application listed on the iOS App Marketplace and the Android Google Play Store.
EDIT: This will definitely work on Android. You must get pass Apples app approval process to get on iOS of course.
I want to develop an application which works both in a regular browser and as an Android app. Both seem suitable but would I be right in saying if I went with Phone Gap, deploying the same html content as a regular, server hosted website is not trivial and would require modification? Also, are multi page applications not desirable in a Phone Gap wrapper?
Are there any alternatives I should consider? I'm surprised someone hasn't already written an Android wrapper with all the hardware access wiring done already. Or have they?
There are few things you should know,
If you are going to publish your app also on iOS, you can't use server hosted website for your app.
All of your basic functionality must stand on your app assets, is one of the iOS guidelines, and its also make-sense for best ui performance (both iOS & Android).
Use server-side wisely, when you want to fetch data which have to be up-to-date.
there are some new mobile browser features which will be available in the future, that allow your website to use the device hardware functions:
Device API on W3C
Good luck dude ;)
You can try with jquery mobile framework:
http://www.jquerymobile.com
It is jquery based framework for developing web apps that works on standard web and on multiple mobile devices (with cordova)