I don't quite understand the cordova plugin procedure.
I found out that it works through the Cordova Webview, but I don't know which
functions and classes are necessary.
It would be great if someone had the time to explain it, a sequencediagramm would be the best for understanding.
greetings, Kurt
This may help you to understand more:
Using WebViews
A WebView uses the same rendering and JavaScript engine as the browser, but it runs under the control of your application. The WebView can be full screen or you can mix it with other Views. The content for your WebView can come from anywhere. The WebView can download content from the web, or it can come from local files stored in your assets directory. The content can even be dynamically generated by your application code.
and
Android WebView, Javascript and CSS
I have come across some situations where I had to use a WebView to display some HTML content. Displaying HTML content is pretty straight-forward. But when it comes to controlling the web view, it gets a little complex. Things like showing alerts, manipulating divs and controlling the activity (closing/finishing). This example shows a few techniques that will get you going with Javascript and CSS with WebView.
Related
I want to know if it's possible to design my android app UI with HTML5 and CSS3.
If it's possible, is there any performance issue?
Android has WebView which can render HTML content, but it doesn't provide the same user experience as native apps so its use is generally discouraged.
Yes it possible. As rhoadster91 stated, you can use a normal Android WebView which loads your "index.html". All your HTML files should be in the "assets/www" directory. But you'll find plenty tutorials out there which explain everything step by step. Have a look at Googles developer site.
A second possibility would be Phonegap. It is a little tool which helps you to deploy your app for various devices (Android, iOS, WP,...) while coding your app only once in HTML.
I experimented with jquery mobile, native application and phonegap. Building a web application at first seemed very attractive at first as the coding is a lot easier compared to native applications. Here is my opinion based on my research:
Using phonegap slows your application responses, it loads slowly and together with jquery mobile the response and load time increases. So I didnot use it.
Using jquery alone was no different in Gingerbread mobile and on emulator you can clearly see the lag in switching between one div to another div. I didnot use it either.
What I did was use android Webview. I wrote my own javascript and css and placed them on the head section of my page. Used div for changing pages on button click. This approach worked really good giving nearly native performance.
First, a disclaimer: i'm completely new to iphone, android or any mobile development. In the other side, i've been developing websites (php, javascript) for long time.
I have a website which is adapted for mobile and works great. But, there are some features i need such as prevent the screen from dimming (my site is designed to be used for many hours without user interaction while being permanently visible or for example being able to send notifications (with sound, etc., to attract user attention)).
This has lead me to consider a webview. From what i've seen, it's about creating a native app which just a webview (browser without toolbars) and using html and javascript to operate. It will use some native functions to perform some native actions (such as the ones i want).
I've searched around and i don't have a specific response to this: can i tell a webview to, permanently load the content from a remote site ? i mean, my site is php based (zend), with many jquery content manipulation. Can i tell him something like LOAD htp://www.mysyite.com and let him do everything else from it ? absolutely no local content applies, everything is remote. The webview would just be an "interface" to the website.
And additional question is: can i use jquery on it ? ajax calls ? geolocation ? i mean, in a browser i can, i just wonder if inside a webview i can.
I've read that phonegap does this. But most of the time, when taking about phonegap and about webview i general, i read people talking about loading locally the page not remotely in a permanent basis.
Finally, yes, i will build a native app in the future. But now, i simply don't have time to learn about android, ios and blackberry at the same time. Thanks a lot for your responses.
For Android only:
Can i tell him something like LOAD htp://www.mysyite.com and let him do everything else from it ? absolutely no local content applies, everything is remote. The webview would just be an "interface" to the website.
Yes, of course you can. Suppose you have a webview in an activity (it's really easy), you would load the web page something like:
WebView myWebView = .... // get a reference from XML or if you just created get its ref
myWebView.loadURL("http://www.mysite.com");
I would start with this API Guide article. Also, taken from WebView JavaDoc:
A WebView has several customization points where you can add your own behavior. These are:
Creating and setting a WebChromeClient subclass. This class is called when something that might impact a browser UI happens, for instance, progress updates and JavaScript alerts are sent here (see Debugging Tasks)
Creating and setting a WebViewClient subclass. It will be called when things happen that impact the rendering of the content, eg, errors or form submissions. You can also intercept URL loading here (via shouldOverrideUrlLoading()).
Modifying the WebSettings, such as enabling JavaScript with setJavaScriptEnabled().
Injecting Java objects into the WebView using the addJavascriptInterface(Object, String) method. This method allows you to inject Java objects into a page's JavaScript context, so that they can be accessed by JavaScript in the page.
Please be also aware that the webview is not that powerful as the phone's browser. Here is a SO thread where a friend posted an interesting question. You might find helpful the answers he got.
I have to design a android,ios application for my website.I searched and find out that phonegap can be good one for that.Please provide me info that how to get the content of website in phonegap?On the first page i have buttons like home,contact etc.On click of home button,the home page from website should be shown.
PhoneGap is set of libraries like jQuery.
You normally write html pages and include javascript files from phonegap.
Check out phonegap example project.
Look, what you are talking about is .html,.css,.js files that you can easily get after saving any web page from your web-browser.
Rest you can use in the www folder of your phonegap project. And I
would rather suggest you to go for webview present in the native
android that is nothing but actually would provide you the same
functionality that you have been looking for.
---Edit---
Now as you have said that you want the home page buttons like about us etc. that would be copied via web browser and would be there for you as far as the html code is concerned but if you want it to look well on a small mobile device that you should create a responsive designed html and you should read some good articles about responsive web design. That would actually change your way of thinking about creating applications via html within mobile devices.
I have a string which consumes the html code of a form and I want to show that form in my app and it should also work further as on submit it should move forward to next page.
I used WebView, it just shows the page in a static way. It don't support buttons and DatePicker, so I DONT WANT WEBVIEW.
First off, WebView does support buttons, and you could support a DatePicker either by using an HTML/JS one or by doing something fancy to route a request to the Java side of things. I really suspect your insistence on not using WebView is going to prove unproductive.
That said, sure you should show your HTML in your app without using WebView... you could write your own web control or take another (Firefox is open source as is WebKit on which WebView is based, in fact so is WebView itself for that matter). That's going to be a heck of a lot of work though.
In my application, i have some external urls to load, for which i am using a custom webview. but the performance of this webview is very very slow. If i open the same url in native android browser, it works fine. but in the webview, it just takes a lot of time to load the page.
Is there anyway that the performance of a webview can be enhanced in terms of loading a webpage time? Help is always appreciated.
Usama, WebViews will be little slower than the browser as here every activity has to have a callback to the Android app layer.
Having said that, see if you can disable javascript (if it's not used in your app) and more importantly check the caching behavior in the webview that has been set.
WebSettings has some methods related to caching like - setAppCacheEnabled, setAppCacheMaxSize, setCacheMode etc.
setDatabaseEnabled, javascrpt, loadImagesAutomatically are other properties that might impact the load time.