This might be a silly question, but wondering if I was able to build an iOS app completely in a UIWebview. Essentially not have one thing be native to iOS.
You can actually. There are several ways to use HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to make mobile apps like iOS. You can use frameworks/programs like Cordova/PhoneGap. These frameworks/programs can let you use web languages and then compile it into an executable for the device. Something that can be submitted to the AppStore. Whether or not Apple accepts it thats another story. ;)
The other thing you can do is you want it to completely run off the web is you can essentially build a web app on a server like any other web app. However, you can put in CSS3 media queries and Javascript that can detect the size of the screen. Users can use their built in web browsers to access your site. If the screen isn't the right size, then you can redirect the user like if they try to access it with a laptop. With this method you can use server side scripting languages like PHP to do your computation processing. However, connection is required to the server and if a whole lot of people log in to your server, then the server can get bog down.
If you are interested in using web base languages for mobile applications, I highly suggest looking into PhoneGap/Cordova.
Related
I'm planning an app for work and venturing into potential features which I've not used before.
Essentially I need to be able to access files on a network share, read, write and delete files as well as amend the file names. As a pretty closed platform I'm not sure whether iOS is capable of such a thing and if it is, what features should I look for to begin researching?
My Google-Fu hasn't come up with anything thus far so hopefully looking for someone to point me in the right direction.
Thanks.
I know this isn't very secure, but I'd personally create an ASP.NET app on your target Windows Server, or a different Server on the domain. Create web services exposed, and make an iOS app with UIWebView. You can do RPC calls from the web service that do WMI/ADSI/File System manipulation. You can prompt for domain credentials, and do remote calls essentially is the gist.
You could expose the web app so that your app can access it from local network, or URL. If you were to access it from outside I'd suggest using some secure credentials in Windows/IIS.
Some years ago I created a "mobile-friendly" web app that allowed me to manage servers, perform RPC, and do basic Active Directory queries. Also allowed file listing and deletion/moving/copying with some creative scripting. It was essentially a ASP.NET/C# web app that loaded in a iPhone app. UIWebView in iOS was a able to load it, used AJAX and some other client side scripting that looked decent. You'd essentially have to make sure that your web app renders properly in Safari/UIWebView (which is bastardized safari).
Here's a link to a demo of what I created:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czXmubijHwQ&t=12s
I ran it in a browser, but it'd run from my PSP, Android test devices, iPod Touch, Blackberry, etc.
We have a ASP.NET MVC website built that's optimized for the Mobile and Tablet devices using Responsive design.
We would like to reuse/package these views into a Phonegap application for creating iOS/Android/Windows apps.
Our initial thought was to have skeleton views in the Phonegap project and serve the content (including markup) remotely from the ASP.NET MVC website. However, my understanding is that Apple may not approve an app with such an architecture.
Any thoughts on how to design the Phonegap app is really appreciated.
As you hint at, Apple generally discourages websites masquerading as native apps via thin shells. See this SO for some discussion:
Does Apple reject "mobile web shell" applications?
For the current app I am working on, I do all my development by serving through Apache and testing in Chrome. I test on device by wrapping the same set of html/cs/js files with Cordova build process and pushing to device. The only reason that wouldn't work for you to is you must have a bunch of server side logic and conditional rendering of your views.
So either you:
1) Just go for it and try to submit a simple native wrapped website and very well may get approved no problem
OR
2) My recommendation is to do a little reworking of your view designs/interactions such as including a native-mobile-app style navbar, etc. so that the experience is more similar to an app than a web site. Then with your new client/app Views, swap out the server side Controller/Model interactions with a Rest/JSON api.
For example, currently you have something like this:
//Server side
class mainController
{
void fooAction()
{
string bar = getModelThatIncludesBar().bar;
...
renderView($bar, 'fooView');
}
}
Instead, more like this:
// Client side, poor mans MVC
bar = useAjaxToGetModelThatIncludesBar().bar; // pretend this is synchronous :)
...
fooViewElementThatNeedsBarData.innerHtml = bar
Edit: I have drastically simplified things here to try to distill it down to the basic two choices I see. Message me or whatever if you want to chat about it.
My suggestion is you need to separate your client and server side language. Then convert your server side language into web service either SOAP or REST so your client side can send and receive data from your server. Phonegap is allowed client side language only.
I'm working on a web application that uses django.
I would like to create a native application of the site for ios / android using phone gap.
Is this possible? As I understand native devices cannot interpret python code.
It is early in the project and if it proves too difficult I may go with a different framework I.e backbone.js.
Any thoughts / experiences?
That's right, you cannot run python code on iOS or Android using PhoneGap, but there is no need to do that. Yes, you can build a native mobile application of your site using PhoneGap.
I'll try to explain a bit how these technologies compare to each other:
Django is a python web framework running on a web server
PhoneGap is a framework for building native mobile applications using web technologies (HTML5+CSS+Javascript), the application will run on a mobile device
One common approach is to build the mobile UI with i.e. jQuery Mobile and use the Django web application to provide a RESTful API to get data to the application.
Take a look at this another question for more details.
Edit: Answer the question in the first comment
Yes, it's possible to build a fast and well working application with these frameworks. The performance with today's smartphones is more dependent on the quality of the implementation than i.e. jQuery mobile and Django in themselves.
Basically with PhoneGap there are three different ways for showing the content to the user:
server side generated pages
pages generated on the client side with Javascript usin data from the server, transferred in a predefined format using for example JSON
a combination of the previous two
This answer clarifies server-client communication and page rendering quite well.
You could use PhoneGap a bit like a constrained web browser, and basically show content directly from your server as you would when the user accesses the site with a normal web browser. But I don't recommend this, though. This approach has many downsides to it (i.e. what happens when the user opens a link from your website leading to another website?)
To be accurate, at least in my opinion, UI written with Javascript and running inside an app built with PhoneGap is not native. Comparing native applications and PhoneGap applications is another thing, here is one take on explaining the differences.
I don't know what kind of service you are building, but in general I'd suggest evaluating the different approaches before starting to build an application. Would a responsive mobile optimized web site do or is there real need for what an app can provide?
If you decide to build an app with PhoneGap, I'd suggest that you do it with client side Javascript and fetch the data from the Django backend with XHR requests in JSON format. There are lots of examples available in the internet.
I have recently started playing around with iOS development and have got most of the basics down. I would however like to know about some best practices and what you guys think is the best in coding practice and application architecture.
What I have in mind is a simple application that gets information from a web server, displays the data to the user, and allows the user to edit the data which must then be updated on the web server.
What I would like to know is:
1) What type of web server / architecture is best suited for something like this? For example, data passing / updating similar to something like the facebook or twitter etc. applications where data is retrieved, potentially updated, and sent back for updating.
2) What type of authentication / security can be built into an application like this? I was thinking something in the line of username / password being stored on the server. Obviously the data should be secure when being transfered.
3) Are there any "free" web servers out there to play around with. I'm not building anything enterprise size, just need somewhere to play. Would the Google App Engine be suitable for something like this? What I have thought up to now is that you would probably need to implement a web service or something. Is this correct? Or are there better ways?
4) Are there any good tutorials around? I have started looking at the ones in the apple.com developer center, but I would like to get other people's point of views too.
I realise these are not really programming questions, but I would appreciate any insight that some more experienced iOS developers have. I would like to get the best practices down by incorporating the above into an app.
Thanks!
This doesn't sound like you need an iOS app, more like just a browser based app that works on the iPhone. If you need features like the GPS, Camera, Gyroscope, taking offline things that are native to the phone, then yes build it on iOS.
But if it's a simple web application that performs the operations you mentioned, then you can look at building a mobile web application. The nice thing is that it will work across iPhone, Droid, WiMo 7, really anything that can host a browser.
1) You can pick almost anything you're comfortable with. I program in both ASP.NET and Python for web apps. Personally, I'm building a web app on Django with Python. It's cheap (free) and there are lots of resources for learning as well as an active community.
2) Security is a rather large topic, there are many things beyond authentication and authorization, like cross-site scripting, sql injection, etc that need to be taken into consideration. Django has some things that help with this. But at the simplest you can secure your site with SSL encryption when performing authentication. You should also consider OpenID as an alternative for authentication, like how StackOverflow gives you the option.
3) I do all my "play" on my macbook pro or pc at home. You can do all of this for free on your own machine, and when you're ready to deploy pick a host, like Amazon or something like Media Temple.
Since Rails uses MVC architecture. I was wondering that if we can use Rails to develop a mobile app or any web app.
Out of MVC the 'M' and 'C' won't change to develop the mobile app right?
I mean the models and controllers will remain the same.
Only the view portion should be changed such that, instead of using html.erb files I want Java or Android SDK or whatever, to provide the UI for the mobile user.
Can someone enlighten me on this perspective?
Also I have been hearing about jRuby does it come into play for our mobile app development requirement?
The answer to this question is going to depend on how you want to deploy this app. Do you want it running completely on the phone or can it be a web app disguised as an iphone/android app?
For the native app solution I'd checkout the Rhodes Framework. It's not RoR but you'll see that it's an MVC framework that feels similar. This will allow you to build native iphone/android apps using Ruby.
For the 2nd option, web app disguised as a mobile app, I'd recommend Sencha Touch. Sencha has done an amazing job mimicking the look and feel of native iphone/android apps with their Javascript library. With this solution it would be just like any other web app though it's targeted for android and iphone via it's UI.
I've created an example rails / ember.js App that is exported with Phonegap. It uses just the usual MVC architecture of a Rails and an Ember.js App. Maybe you will find it useful. It also implements token authentication based on ember-auth and several OAuth strategies.
Currently in de the devel branch: https://github.com/joscas/base_app/tree/devel
Heroku deploy: https://starter-app-staging.herokuapp.com (the desktop version)
Exported with phonegap-rails gem (of which I'm also the author) for assets, fix paths etc.
Absolutly YES!
Ruby on Rails just a backend tech, is the same as what you plan to do for normal browser. There are only two things that you need to consider about mobile app. First is mobile browser's content size because you need to adjust your layout to fit the size. There is a HTML meta tag called viewport can help you.
Ex.
This script will tell user's browser that the content should be fit the devise size,initial-scale defines the viewport rate and maximum-scale defines how many times this page can scale, and user-scalble=0 means user cannot scale the page. More about viewport you can check the Mozilla's doc.
The other thing you need to consider is the HTML5 techs, but actually these aren't problems when you are using jQuery mobile. I recommend you to check their docs. This is very useful and clear for anyone.
RubyonRails is web application framework - it is running on server and user observer the result of application built on RubyOnRails inside browser(or Browser component), despite the fact that you can process on server just "M" from "MVC", and implement "V" and "C" fully on client side( in mobile browser).
In theory, you can fully deploy RubyOnRails application on client side( even RubyOnRails server and etc), but it will be rather expensive and hard, but it is could not be require in any rational project.
assuming:
There are two way you can choose:
Organize RubyonRails application on the server(process there Model), and process "V" and "C" on client side with any proper js libraries.
You can develop Ruby(not RubyOnRails application) - at least it is possible to develop for Android with JRuby.
Yes you can . Your view can be an web page/android/ ios application as view.
You may want to try jQuery Mobile (which is still in alpha by now) if it's just a matter of UI. If you need a tighter integration with your mobile, I don't think that running Rails would be efficient enough.
Try using React Native, the backend technology can still be Ruby while the front-end can use React Native to build mobile app both Android and iOS.
React Native