Id like to create an HTML5 web apps/site which could be consumed on Desktop, tablet and Mobile devices. I want it to be flexible in such a way that I could use PHP or Java with it. After intensive googling I found Droptiles (droptiles.com) by Omar Al Zabir. Since I was also thinking of incorporating the Windows Live Tiles look and functionality in my mobile web site, I think that it is a good choice. My question is what are the HTML5 features which are supported by Droptiles? I need to know this before commiting to this framework. So far reading its documentation I have not read of any html5 feature. I hope people with experience using Droptiles could answer my question. Thanks in advance.
By the way the html5 features that I consider as deal breakers are
offline storage
support for viewport meta tag ( or anything that would allow it to scale depending on the device used)
html5 input types (email,phone number, calendar etc)
If you have an existing website, you can load the website in c# with the webview element.
The droptiles is build with html5/javascript. So everything must work fine.
Only the HTML5 type=color is not supported in Windows IE engine
Related
Does anyone know a framework to develop a mobile application for Android with Java and HTML?
I mean develop UI with HTML (to reuse it with an other OS) and native functions with Java.
For the moment I am trying to develop multiplatform apps with Qt but it's quite complex to use native functions from Java, that's why I'm looking for an easier way to do it.
I don't think you can find this kind of framework.
If you meet some problems to use native functions with Qt I recommend you to watch BogDan Vatra videos and pdf
https://www.qtdeveloperdays.com/sites/default/files/BogdanVatra_Extending_Qt_Android_Apps_with_JNI.pdf
Besides, you should look at the QtAndroidNamespace class and runOnAndroidThread function.
Edit : You can find the videos in the Tutorials part of QtCreator
I am not sure about the Java but using javascript,we have alot of Frameworks like Titanium, Sencha Touch and PhoneGap etc.In this you can simply use the html,js,and css3 bundle to creates the IOS Android and as well as web.
I would strongly advise against reusing the UI on different mobile operating systems - it will always look as if it doesn't belong on one of those systems. Creating an Android UI isn't that complicated, you should try it.
That said, you could have just one big WebView on your native UI, displaying your HTML UI. You might need a web server in your app, serving the UI, though - I'm not sure.
I´m soon to start a new mobile app project and I dont have that much experience with either iOS or Android development but I have used Vaadin for presentation tier on different occasions.
The app will most likely be lightweight for the mobile client but more heavy for backend servers(jboss). I feel kinda lost so i´m asking you.
Question: What are the drawbacks of using Vaadin touchkit compared to other frameworks/ build from scratch? Where might a problem occur? Any input and recommendations are welcome!
I am currently developing a small application using Vaadin TouchKit that once it enters production will have some hundreds of users. I haven't been able to locate any publicly available apps in production that have been implemented using Vaadin Touchkit, so what I'm going to list here is based solely on my personal experience with the technology.
Drawbacks compared to native applications:
I'm assuming this is what you refer by "building from scratch".
As this is web techonology, your application performance will always correlate heavily with the quality of the users Internet connection. If you have to render large UI's with a lot of components and details, it will be slower than doing so in a native application. A lot slower if the users connection is poor. Or if a connection is unavailable, then your application pretty much becomes unavailable. There is a way to use HTML5-cache for providing an offline-mode in a Vaadin Touchkit app, but it is not very useful for storing large datasets as the cache has a lot more limitations than for example an Android SQLite database. For simple UI-stuff it might be viable, but storing data for offline-access is in my opinion pretty much out of the question.
Other than the above mentioned points, I have not run into any missing capability, as you can use any Java library at any time on the server-side, and your application will be running safely in a servlet container.
Upsides compared to native applications:
You didn't spesifically ask for the upsides, but I guess this is any input and recommendations.
Your Vaadin Touchkit app can run on basically any mid-high tier mobile device launched after 2010, basically excluding only the ones with Windows Phone OS, since Internet Explorer does not use WebKit for rendering and other browsers are not available as far as I know. And since this is a web application, it does not exclude any other desktop browsers than Internet Explorer. By creating one application, you support roughly 80-95% of your users.
As mentioned, any Java library, any internal API, any authentication method supported by your hosting environment is available to your app, which is not as easy to implement for native mobile applications. This can be overcome with great software engineering, but demands a significantly higher amount of developer resources, not to mention that you are still stuck doing it for each platform separately.
And of course maintenance of a servlet app compared to the maintenance of a native application is considerably more simple: deploy once, all users get the changes without doing anything. No app store, no versioning, no hassle.
Vaadin TouchKit compared to other web development:
I am not familiar, at all, with web application development without using Vaadin, so I am not going to tell you whether or not it is the way to go compared to other modern web application technologies and frameworks. All I'll say is that in my experience Vaadin makes creating UI's and backend functionality relevantly easy and more graspable if you are familiar with Java development and desktop application development in general.
To conclude, don't rush in to create your mission critical application using Vaadin TouchKit before at least prototyping with it, and getting to know the performance and limitations it presents. For certain type of applications, it might be one of the best solutions. For a certain, larger group than the other, it is probably one of the worst. It is not a very mature or generally adopted framework, but it is useful. I'll be happy to hear more about the type of app you're planning and help you figure out if there are any showstoppers for using Vaadin TouchKit.
P.S. You've probably already run into this, but this document opens up the guts of one of the TouchKit demo apps:
http://demo.vaadin.com/vornitologist/VAADIN/tutorial/touchkit-tutorial.html
I just tried out vaadin touchkit examples on my android phones, well now I got affirmation why I prefer native software over html in some cases. Try it out - dont be confused by nice-looking styles, just try to USE it, this is what apps are made for. In my case I cannot withstand non responsive GUI or not smoothly scrolling lists. Again, for a simple gallery - a JavaScript/HTML solution is just perfect :) So the right way is the hybrid way! (imho)
Vaadin Touchkit offers very good user experience and provides wide range of UI components to apps.
Its default iOS theme provide almost iOS like UI and it also offers many other themes too.
But this will not run as smooth as platform specific mobile apps. as ultimately it will not completely leverage the real power of mobile platform features as finally it is going to run in a mobile web browser. as compared to native mobile apps
Find more detail on vaadin touchkit and comparison with similar technogies like ZK Mobile and native platform specific apps. : http://jtechnoprojects.blogspot.in/2012/12/vaadin-touchkit-vs-zk-mobile-vs.html
I want to make cross - platform app which could be used for different smart-phones, and been advised to make 'Web App'.
Can 'web app' work without internet?
How to do it, which programing language to use?
thanks
Oh sure. Bundle all your HTML, JS anc CSS with your app, and have a thin Java/Android app over these assets. If you are not making any calls to fetch or show external HTML/pages, you don't need internet.
Most likely no.
While it is possible to run "web apps" without access to the internet (you can simply execute Javascript locally from some browsers), it would be
(Subjectively) not particularly useful.
Not supported by many devices, whom (like the iPhone) do not allow the storage and execution of arbitrary, non-native code on the device.
However, some frameworks do exist that hold the idea of "web apps" can be a distribution model. For example, PhoneGap allows you to code in HTML5/Javascript, and distribute your app to multiple platforms.
Yes, it can work offline once downloaded from web. Use just any regular programming language for web application development. If you are good at programming, I recommend ruby-on-rails or ASP.NET MVC with Jquery mobile.
You might want to look into frameworks like:
PhoneGap: http://www.phonegap.com/
jQuery Mobile: http://jquerymobile.com/
GWT Mobile: http://code.google.com/p/gwt-mobile-webkit/
Your question is very broad so it's hard to give a useful answer. Essentially when making a web app you'll normally be working with javascript, css, and html... though there are frameworks which will let you write your app in Java/Python/Ruby and then have those languages create your app for you. Keep in mind this is mostly all front facing stuff though. The actual web app will still need to have a backend written in a programming language that you understand (hopefully).
Good luck :).
Check out the jQuery Mobile API - I started using it recently and it has proved to be a viable option. Check this out.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_Application_Cache with an application cache your Web App can be used offline. It will cache the resources you specify to disk.
So you can write a Javascript + HTML webpage/app and use it both on and off line.
You can cache/store:
HTML
CSS
Javascript
Images
GET Requests
Is is possible to display html document in J2ME mobile app? Is it possible using for example WebKit? I was looking for some webkit's j2me implementation or some tutorial or advice in google but found nothing.
BOLT Webkit based Browser
I came across this, but haven't had the time to try it myself, but the reviews seem to be reasonable.
Its closed source but they provide later versions than the current for download for free.
Hope this can shed some light
Try this Framework: Fire
LWUIT now supports html and CSS in LWUIT 1.4.
I am a fresher in web developing , is I ve to study applets?
If you are a Java person, maybe look at JavaFX instead (even though it is not clear yet if that technology will take off any more than applets did).
If you are a web design person, do not even think about it before you got acquainted with Flash and HTML5. Applets are quite marginal at this point.
Most folks say no, but I still see a lot of great uses for Applets and in fact have seen really complex commercial UIs coded within the context of an applet.
in a short word, no, applets are a dead technology for the general purpose web.
on intranets with lots of bandwith and controlled client environments they maybe of some valid use.
look at Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as an alternative to creating applets.
Adobe Flex is also a good alternative now.
If you want an embedded client application, the Java Web Start (the better Google keyword is JNLP) is less or more the successor of the legacy Java Applet. Alternatives to this are Adobe Flash and MS ClickOnce.
If you want an RIA (Rich Internet Application), then JavaFX is the better Java based choice. Alternatives to this are the MS SilverLight, Adobe Air and Adobe Flex.
Apart from JavaFX, Flash, you can learn about Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. They are kind of extending the limits of what was earlier possible with just Flash
There is still one thing that I know of that a Java applet can do and Silverlight, Flex (non-AIR), etc can't do:
Drag and drop from the filesystem.
Flex offers a o/s based browse and select filesystem access. Silverlight has a similar functionality. But to the best of my knowledge if you want the user to drag a file from Windows Explorer etc. into a web-site based control, Java applets are pretty much your only choice. You could create a Flex based app using Adobe AIR that can ask the filesystem outside the o/s browse and select dialog but I'm not convinced the AIR install base is adequate yet. Probably depends on your target customer (early adopter, install whatever you say to vs. stable corporate user with IT lockdown on their workstation).
If someone knows otherwise for certain, please comment!
But to answer the original question, unless you need the drag and drop filesystem to web functionality, I would spend your time on Flex. Silverlight and Java FX can't compete with Flash for market penetration. Since Flex compiles to flash, it has a very high install base (>95% of internet enabled computers) and its base updates to the newest version frequently. Inserting a flash file into a browser is a easier than the arcane art of applets.
if you want/might get a job where you maintain old applications then probably you will deal with Applets.
For new projects, dont get close to it.