I am looking to implement simple automation which requires screen scraping for an android (ICS) phone.
What are the options, frameworks, libraries available?
I have been using WATIN on .NET and found it very powerful and yet easy to use,
A Java version of WATIN, WATIR - is it a good choice for web screenscraping / automation for the Android platform?
You can use watir-webdriver or selenium-webdriver Ruby gems to drive real browsers in Android emulators or real Android devices. Of course, if you are not a Ruby person, you can do the same from another language. More information: http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/AndroidDriver
Using RESTful API enables you to extract data with minimum coding effort. Here are some links you might be interested in.
Calling a REST web service from Android
http://timewasted.net/?p=127
Synthetics Web
http://www.syntheticsweb.com/
Related
I want to build an android app, and I have read, but very little about ionic which is also used to create mobile applications. I have worked on android more, and want to know what is the difference between both ? sorry for asking a general question, but I could not understand the difference between the purpose served by both Android SDK (Java) and ionic (html, css, angular js).
First don't compare Ionic with Android. Ionic is an Hybrid/Cross Platform Framework, based on Apache Cordova.
If you want develop the Application only for Android devices you can opt for Native Android. If your target is both Android and iOS go ahead with Ionic.
Ionic uses AngularJS and you need Javascript, HTML5 and CSS knowledge. Where Android native coding is based on Java.
I'd like to build an android application for a school project but I'm a bit confused, I saw that i can build an application using Java or using Jquery mobile.
Do they have the same capabilities?
If i build an application using Jquery , can i pack it and have it installed like a java application (as apk) or is it only used for building websites?
If so, what tool do i use to pack it?
jQuery Mobile needs an intermediary framework that communicates between JavaScript and Java. PhoneGap is a popular one of these frameworks.
PhoneGap is also actively maintained and they roll out new versions almost every month.
The main reason to use PhoneGap/jQuery Mobile is that it makes development easy if you already know HTML/JS/CSS. Another great reason to use PhoneGap is that you can use your existing website as the base for native applications, yeah, plural, not just Android but also iOS, Blackberry, etc. It also gives you a pre-built UI with some widgets so you don't have to roll your own.
The jQuery Mobile documentation talks about some of the caveats to creating a native application with PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile.
I don't know what you have already tried or what your skill set is (based on your stackoverflow history you may know more about java than I do), but you would be best off just using the Android SDK. I was able to design and complete a custom business project and learn java while doing it. I can't comment much on jQuery since I've never used it. jQuery seems like it might be a nice for the reasons Jasper listed but might add layers of complexity you don't need to deal with if you don't need to run your app on other platforms.
Jquery Mobile Framework provides the way how you web application looks on different hand held devices simply but this can not use the native device capabilities like picking up an contact from the contact book/application. while native application has the capabilities to handle all the system generated events or broadcasts.
I have developed an application for iPhone. Is there any way to port that application on to Blackberry RIM so that i can avoid rewriting the application in Java for Blackberry RIM?
I am rewriting my application for black berry,suggest me the way to rewrite so that later stage I can port that directly to Android.
Thanks in advance.
The short answer is no.
The closest thing I am aware of is projects like PhoneGap (and others, including Appcelerator Titanium) which allow for cross platform development for smart phones including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry by creating hardware specific wrappers around WebApps. PhoneGap essentially allows for Web Apps to have more complete access to the hardware and operating system of these devices (like the camera, motion detection, push notification, etc.) by wrapping the Web App in a customized browser that provides javascript handles for accessing the hardware.
PhoneGap will even build binaries for each of the supported platforms on their servers (with limitations...for example, if you want to submit to the Apple App Store, you currently need to build the iPhone binary yourself due to developer certificate issues).
So if your app could be (re)conceived as a Web App with some extra help accessing device specific hardward features, then PhoneGap or similar development kits might provide some shortcuts to cross platform deployment.
not really. If your app is written in custom objective-c code, then you will need to manually port it to blackberry java. there are some cross-platform app frameworks out there though that may allow you to do what you need, but youd have to redevelop your app with those frameworks.
I would like to develop applications for iPhone and Android devices. Which language it is better to use Java or Flash?
I have read that Adobe Flash CSS 5.5 support compatibility for ActionScript on both devices. Will be interesting to know plus and minus sides for both languages?
Remember that we have to develop application for both devices, and we have a small part of that application already written in Java.
Titanium by Appcelerator,
A superb tool to develop apps for all major Mobile Computing platforms.
You could get yourself a MonoTouch license and write your App in .NET, for deployment on both iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. It's not quite cheap though.
I need a Java Framework for Web development with these caractheristics:
Rich graphical UI;
Development tools available for most known IDE (Eclipse or Netbeans);
Free (preferencially non GPL);
Large community;
Easy to generate Web/Desktop/Mobile with the same code.
After some research we've found ZK Framework but we couldn't understand if we can compile for desktop or mobile.
Thnks
ZK Mobile is a native client running on Java Mobile (or Android API). It does not require a modern browser, but, as I know, there is only a limited set of components (much less the number of Ajax components).
I would be seriously surprised if a framework exist where the same GUI code can be used for web/desktop and mobile apps. The service -and model layer of your application should be reusable without any problem but you can't expect JSP's for isntance to be displayed in a swing or android application.
I didn't know ZK yet, looks nice but I guess there mobile part is intended for mobile webbrowsers and not mobile applications.
You could also consider vaadin, GWT or apache wicket.
I would recommend you to consider GWT seriously. Although it is not the best choice for mobile clients, gwt applications could be executed in your mobile device , if your mobile device's browser can execute javascript. But again I should express that native mobile applications would be better choice than browser based mobile applications.