I am .net developer. I want to develop an application for mobile devices. As i am a web developer i am well versed with web technology & scripting languages. I am a big fan of JQuery so, i found something Jquery Mobile Framework for mobile application development.
So, I've got few questions:
Will this framework help me develop web applications or only for designing purpose?
Can i use my Jquery knowledge to implement web application using Jquery Mobile Framework?
Can i use Jquery AJAX in mobile app development?
It won't help you build a mobile "application" but it will help you create a mobile enabled web site.
It will help you build the front end of a mobile web application.
Yes
Yes, if you are referring to mobile web applications.
The back-end technology you use does not matter. I've built several .NET MVC sites using jQuery Mobile, which have all worked pretty well.
jQuery Mobile will help you build a website, you can then view that website in a browser or package it into an app. If you want to create native applications out of HTML/CSS/JS then you will need an intermediary step that lets you run a webview as your app. PhoneGap is an example of a framework that allows you to use native APIs while building your application in HTML/CSS/JS.
Your knowledge of jQuery will come-in handy but you will be forced to think about a jQuery Mobile website differently. For instance, pages are not HTML documents, but pseudo-pages that can be in separate documents but can also have multiple pseudo-pages inside a single HTML document. And because remote documents are brought into the DOM via AJAX (for animated transitions), you need to code your site to use unique IDs across the whole site, not just from page to page.
Absolutely! jQuery AJAX makes creating dynamic websites and native apps easy. You basically just load a bunch of views (in HTML/JS/CSS) into the app. package and then your server does the modeling. One cool thing to take into consideration is that since you are running from a mobile app., there is no domain from which the response is sent, so there is no cross-domain-policy to worry about.
If you have not yet checked-out PhoneGap, do so, and also see the documentation on the jQuery Mobile website regarding how to create PhoneGap applications using jQuery Mobile:
http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.1.0/docs/pages/phonegap.html
Related
I created a web application on Openshift using Spring MVC and MySQL.
Now I want to go mobile for this application. I want to publish the same application as a mobile app (Android mainly). Primarily, this mobile version should play with HttpPost/Webservice security authorisation too.
I know Pivotal has a Spring Mobile project which helps create a mobile site for the same application (with more sophistication like spring form tags and all).
On the other hand, Phonegap can create a cross-platform mobile app with the help of HTML5 and CSS.
My questions are:
Is it worth it to put my effort on Phonegap or Spring Mobile?
If I choose Spring Mobile, how do I publish a mobile app in the Android Play store?
Some pros and cons or any links for reference would be helpful.
Intro
First, let me give you a warning. While this is a constructive question (better than average questions asked here), people usually like questions from users who spent some time searching for an answer themselves. I will explain this part later.
Differences
Phonegap (Cordova) and Spring Mobile are two completely different frameworks, they serve completely different purposes. You could have found that Googling.
Phonegap (Cordova) is a wrapper framework used for hybrid mobile app creating. Your HTML/CSS/JavaScript code is wrapped into native shell and you can use JavaScript <-> Native bridge code to access native phone functionality. Though you can use it as it is with vanilla JavaScript, it is often used with other mobile frameworks like jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, or Kendo UI.
Spring Mobile is an extension to Spring MVC that aims to simplify the development of mobile web applications. Spring Mobile is a framework that provides capabilities to detect the type of device making a request to your Spring web site and serve alternative views based on that device.
Effort
Everything depends what are you going to do. Hybrid mobile applications are usually done with separate client and server side code. Communication is done using AJAX. Because of this I would skip Spring Mobile and use only Spring as a RESTful web service framework. I personally prefer Play framework, but that's just me.
Of course, you would still need to choose a client-side JavaScript framework, or you can create everything from scratch. I would advise you to use prebuilt frameworks like mentioned jQuery Mobile.
If you really really want to use Spring Mobile
If you really want to use Spring Mobile, it can still be done. Phonegap can be used to wrap remote web sites into mobile applications. This approach has several downsides. The application is useless if your site is down and you will not be able to create iOS application because these kinds of applications are rejected on first sight.
Best course of action
Separate client and server side code
Choose a client side mobile JavaScript framework.
Use Spring as RESTful web service, or any other RESTful framework such as Play.
Wrap your client side code into Phonegap (Cordova)
Publish as Android, iPhone application
Links
How to create jQuery Mobile application with Phonegap | Mac version
Sencha Touch vs jQuery Mobile
Secrets of a good jQuery Mobile page architecture
If you already have experience with jQuery, learn the differences between jQuery and jQuery Mobile
http://projects.spring.io/spring-android/
Spring for Android is a framework that is designed to provide components of the Spring family of projects for use in Android apps. Like all Spring projects, the real power of Spring for Android is found in how easily it can be extended.
I have web application design only with HTML5, CSS3 and Jquery along with this i have one project with AJAX enabled WCF services to provide endpoints to the HTML pages. I also have couple of projects that have webservices used in my web application.
Now I want to use convert this application into native apps with Phonegap.
please help me on this, forward resources that we can use to convert web application into native android via phonegap.
If you have used only used HTML, JS and CSS in your apps and no server side technologies like ASP.NET or PHP, you can easily get the entire code base running on phone gap. If you need to get the real mobile experience try mobile frameworks like jQuery Mobile or Kendo UI Mobile for UI.
This question already has an answer here:
Convert a website to an android application [closed]
(1 answer)
Closed 9 years ago.
I have an ASP.NET website I want to convert to a downloadable native app for iOS/Android devices.
I was wondering if this was at all possible - I am aware of all the tweaks required to make the website mobile-friendly (server/client wise), but I'm currently unaware of how to compile the website as a native app.
Also, since my site has server-side logic, the native app should work like my normal website, sending and receiving data between the client and server.
Thanks,
Ron
While you are right that a native app and a website are similar that they send and receive data from the server, that's probably the only similarity.
As a concept native apps and websites are very different and I don't think you can expect to convert between the two. Depending on how the website is implemented, it might be more work or less work.
ASP.NET encourages a development model where you don't think about the client and server as separate entities and tries to abstract the technology underneath (HTTP, HTML, web server). This is why most ASP.NET websites are usually implemented in a way which you wouldn't follow when developing an app.
I think your best bet is to either make the existing site mobile-friendly or just implement a native app from scratch. For info about the first suggestion, you can read Scott Hanselman's blog post. As for native apps, I'm sure you can find many resources through Google.
For the fast solution, create a mobile friendly responsive CSS for your existing site and use Cordova/Apache Phonegap shell to embed it as initial page.
If your ASP.NET page is developed using MVC, I would suggest you to write another HTML5 page that uses ASP.NET Web API and use it with Cordova. Of course, you can also choose to develop a native app in a native language of the platform (like Swift in IOS or J2ME in Android) if you can convert it to WEB API structure.
It would be very hard to convert old-styled ASP.NET apps to mobile native apps. Once, I wrote a Cordava hybrid app for a similar issue that uses a browser object to open some local and server pages on the native app. Native part was used for header and tab control navigation. Hybrid apps are like native apps, you can download from app store / google play but they uses internal web browsers to show the content. Some part of your app can be still native.
If you are interested in this Web/Hybrid app development approach, you can also look at Ionic Framework.
Look at Hybrid apps and Cordova for the start. Good luck!
What's the intent behind a framework like Dojo or jQuery Mobile in the context of developing a cross-platform app?
I want to rapidly prototype a mobile app GUI that includes a schedule/calendar. In this case, would I use Dojo instead of just PhoneGap because I would want to also have a web browser based app that goes alone with my mobile app?
Mobile JavaScript frameworks like those provided by Dojo or jQuery theoretically allow you to
write mobile browser independent client side code for web based applications. In other words, you as the developer do not need to be concerned with writing specific code for each mobile browser.
Dojo (or other JS mobile toolkit) and PhoneGap are generally complimentary. PhoneGap is for access to native device services which aren't yet reflected to the browser, like camera or telco access. Dojo and the other toolkits generally let you create mobile-style UIs (may also run on Desktop browser, but would look like a phone) and handle things like touch and scroll gestures. And, as Peter says, cross-browser issues are also handled for you.
We need to develop a Finance Application in Java J2EE which can be accessed from any client that is ( A mobile or Browser )
We need to use technologies like HTML , JSP , Servlets , EJB , Hibernate .
Please let me know is it necessary to develop Pages separately for the Mobile access and browser access?
what you are looking for is adaptative and responsive design, you will be mostly dealing with frontend. Boagworld has some nice contents and a great podcast on the subject
http://boagworld.com/dev/a-case-study-in-responsive-design/
You could have the backend entirely in java. And use jQuery mobile/bootstrap in the frontend. That way the application should work well in mobile browsers. Also using Ajax and having server compute all most everything should give you a very performing app in mobile browsers. Also checkout chrome emulation mode it should help in development and testing the responsive behavior