I am making a Hybrid Application using cordova-cli. My requirement is that the first page in my application must redirect to a website. The entire data required for the application will be loaded into this website from some other data-sources.
The requirement is to access device native features such as camera, accelerometer etc. from pages on this website.
I am using
location.href="http://www.example.com";
to open the pages. I need a unified cordova.js file with all the plugins embedded into it.
Currently I am putting the individual plugins into the lib\android\plugin\android and by using the grunt -f command from grunt-cli, the cordova.js file recieved for android does not seem to produce expected results.
Can't be done I am afraid - because of the way Cordova interacts with the device.
What happens if, using a non-mobile device, you accessed the same website from elsewhere? The website will not know what on earth Cordova is.
Cordova interacts with the native code on the device, so requires this to handle the passing of JS-to-native, and vice-versa.
Related
I have a client with two mobile apps. The first APP1 is built natively using Java and Objective-C. The second APP2 has been build using Unity.
Now the client wants to add a common functionality to both APP1 and APP2. The functionality is some new promo screens with user interaction to win credits.
I was considering to propose WebViews for this, however I came across to Progressive Web Apps.
I would like to ask whether is it possible to add a PWA in existing apps by properly initializing WebViews. I guess that the answer is 'yes'. But is there any benefit (apart from the caching) from using PWA instead of common HTML pages since the mobile app is already there?
Thank you!
A PWA is nothing more than a regular HTML webpage, which has added bonus functionality. Those bonus functionality is the incredible ease of install (if not on iOS, at least), and the offline capabilities.
The offline capabilities mostly means that the app will work (for the most part), even when no internet is available.
The easy install functionality means that if you open the site on Chrome for Android, you can "install" the app directly, without going through the app store. This doesn't work properly on iOS, however.
However, at the end a PWA is still just a webpage. This means that it is not just an app for iOS, or Android. It is an actual webpage, with an URL you can surf to. Installing a PWA just takes a local copy, and displays it in such a way that it looks like a native app.
So, in your case, there is no real bonus of making a PWA. If I read correctly, you just need to add a simple HTML page to both apps, right? You can make this a website, and then use WebView to navigate to it, sure. But there is no need to make it a PWA; it will just run in the native app itself.
Hello i am working on a mobile magento theme. What i am looking is to embed or either cache the html, css and javascript files (do not know which is better!) to the application (local storage on phone) and retrieve the product catalog and related pictures from the database and online servers
My intention is to make the app have minimum load on startup and shows as normal native apps
Can you give some guidelines and routine to do so .
Thanks you.
You can either give PhoneGap a shot (http://www.phonegap.com), or try it yourself, since PhoneGap is nothing more than some small libraries to make native function (notifications, vibrating etc.) available for JavaScript calls.
If you just want to wrap your site into a native app, you can just put it inside a WebView, which runs exactly like the native Android browser.
If you want to use your html, css and js files to create an android app then the easiest way to attempt this is http://phonegap.com/
However, I would strongly urge you to build a native app (on Android) as Phonegap comes with tons of problems and less support.
I am a developer of DisciplineXgames! We are developing a mobile app. We have downloaded the Cordova test suite from here (https://github.com/apache/cordova-mobile-spec). When I upload this on DisciplineXgames server it shows an error in alert box "Error: Apache Cordova did not initialize. Demo will not run correctly." but when we upload the same folder on Phonegap server it works perfectly fine. Unfortunately this doesn't solve our problem as we are building our mobile app on our server and just using Phonegap to redirect the user to the page hosted on DisciplineXgames server if there's Internet in the user's mobile.
First error which I got in the console area in Google Chrome is cordova.js missing when I provided that than it outputs another error that is cordova/channel is required.
Hope you can guide us through how we can use Cordova's amazing features on our server instead of Phonegap's local server.
I am a bit confused as to what you are trying to accomplish here but I am going to take a stab.
You want to develop an app that when the app launches, it checks to see if the device has internet connectivity. If it does, then the app just opens the mobile website hosted on your servers. if there is no internet connectivity then the app ???
Since this is a very simple use case for an app, I would avoid using cordova and instead use PhoneGap Build. Simply write an index.html page and a .js file to check for the connectivity and then use the inappbrowser plugin to open your mobile site if there is connectivity. Once that is done, zip your package, upload to phonegap build and then download your compiled apps.
phoneGap Build allows you to avoid the app building overhead and the need to install things BUT prevents you from taking advantage of some of the deeper configurations and some plugins. But again, for your simple use case, PhoneGap Build sounds like the way to go.
I am using Titanium to create a application for Android. The app uses webview to load external HTML5 webpages. The webpage uses a manifest to cache the page and some assets. This works fine on desktop browsers and third party app browsers in Android (Chrome).
When I view the page in a webview in the Titanium build app, it seems that the manifest is not used, the page just loads everything from the server. The same problem occurs when I use the build in browser of my phone (HTC one X).
What I am trying to accomplish is that the pages are offline available, so that internet is not required tot view cached pages. Is there a fix for this problem, or should I go look in another direction to solve my problem?
the manifest file:
CACHE MANIFEST
# version 1
leerlingen.html
jquery.js
style.css
handler.js
NETWORK:
*
First: Titanium provides much more than a WebView. If you planned to display only web pages you maybe should have a look at PhoneGap / Cordova which might fit your needs in a better way.
As you've noticed not all browsers support HTML5 Caching feature as expected. I can't say if it doesn't work for Android in general or only for your specific version because WebKit usually does support it but it depends of the used WebKit version. And this could be different.
EDIT: It seems that (in native android) this feature can be enabled as written here: Application cache in HTML5 doesn't work in Android PhoneGap application. This is currently not possible in Titanium (there might be inofficial tweaks i don't know but from http://docs.appcelerator.com this is not possible).
Personally i'd prefer another solution. Cache data by myself and display it if there is no network connection. But this depends on what you try to achieve. Having few content which doesn't change often this would make sense. Having dynamically changing data (like twitter stream for instance) this would be difficult. Also it depends on your users and where they want to access your app.
And there is an open question: When you want to use all the caching features why do you want to create an app? Creating a simple mobile webpage would do the same job. When creating an app i wouldn't use the Caching Features of HTML 5. You should keep all the static resources in your app and simply load data from the network. This can be achieved by both Titanium and PhoneGap / Cordova. Titanium is more useful for a native UI and some native Features while PhoneGap / Cordova would be more appropriate for HTML5 based layout.
Just in case someone else is running in the same problems that i was facing, here is what i've done. HTML5's application cache does not seem to work in the build-in browser of Android and with that the webviews. In Titanium there seems to be no way to control the webview as to enable the application cache.
The work around for me was to use Titanium and it's httpClient function (Titanium.Network.HTTPClient) to request the files (HTML, CSS, javascript) and store it in the local app filesystem (Titanium.Filesystem).
I am gonna develop a mobile application for multiple devices, say iPhone, iPad and Android Devices like Samsung Galaxy, Samsung Tab and Samsung Galaxy Nexus,
The application is about listing set of information from webservice to list in the application, So I decided to go for Mobile Web app using jquery mobile,
I want to publish the app in Appstore and Android Market, So I want to wrap the Mobile web in to a Native app, I thought an idea of implementing it in a UIWebView in iOS and WebView in Android,
Another option I found out is phoneGap,which provide an SDk to wrap an Web app into a Native iOS or Android App.
Can you people suggest me , Is it better to go with WebView in your native application, or is it really required to use phoneGap, Whether apple will approve my Application if I am using Mobile Web app in a UIWebView, Kindly Suggest.
Note: In my application there is no real need of Using any native functionality of iOS like, Camera, Contacts etc, I just wanna have a list with information fetched from the Webservice.
If you don't need any of the native features phonegap/callback gives you, do not use it. It's a bloated project that will probably add a ton of features you don't need, if you only need a wrapped web application.
Just use a regular webview, enable JS, caching etc and load your HTML into it.
Use phonegap. http://phonegap.com/
If u use it you can use the phonegap build service to generate apps for all platforms via it. you will only have to worry about the js, html part of the app, like you said.
Or if you dont want to use the phonegap build, still creating your own apps with phonegap is way easier as you dont have to write ANY native code.
There were some issues in Phonegap before because of which Apple was rejecting Phonegap apps previously. Thats fixed now, so thats no problem. :)