How to go about designing a multi-platform app that offers In-App-Purchase?
I'm working with JUCE (Win/OSX/Lin/iOS/Andr).
I know that iOS allows IAP. So I'm guessing OSX also does. I would suspect Windows and Android also provide something similar. I doubt Linux provides anything as it is decentralised by nature.
So maybe I would have to write 4 separate IAP modules, and maintain 4 separate stores. Yuck! I don't want to do that. I recoil from duplication.
Is there any way to unify IAP across these different platforms?
The ideal solution would be single store to maintain, and a single C++ API to access it.
But is this even possible? I think Apple explicitly forbid any kind of store/monetising outside of their system. But http://soom.la/ seems to provide some work around for Unity3D.
The api will be same, but the platform specific functionality has to be separate. This way you have one repository and for a given platform build, pull the required code. Here is an example "Upload XML data to MySQL or NoSQL"
Related
I am building a XCFramework for my company and the primary purpose is to expose our data for clients using this Framework. Clients can access data using this Framework through use-cases without knowing the implementation details.
This Framework needs a very high run-time maintenance support as we may have to add or update the use-cases based on clients requests or changing busing requirements. It's very important to design an automated solution to deploy new changes and make the updated Framework available for clients. I'm looking to host SDK somewhere so I can build and deploy it. Something like maven for Android. But I've not found some good solution yet.
I would love to hear if someone has similar experience or if someone can guide for a better solution. Thanks
I have a whole project developed under iOS which is a sales channel / ecommerce app which is a white branded product.
It mainly relies on a webapp but the native container handles a lot of features (session management, additional services, register to push notification) which is not only intented to make distribution on AppStore possible.
Thus, lot of code within the application delegate, use of several libraries through CocoaPods, etc.
Now, some of our customers whould love to integrate this ecommerce in their existing native apps, for instance, as a tab in a UITabBarController.
What is the best approach to do so ? Considering notably that both AppDelegate must be called, etc?
Thanks
I would advice to refactor your code and extract as much as possible to add it into your own Framework if you really want to keep it clean and have a good way of providing support to your customers. (refactor in a way so that it is easy to use for external projects, for example providing delegates/blocks in a matter that is straight-forward to implement).
A great starting point for learning how to create (Objective-C) iOS Frameworks can be found at https://github.com/jverkoey/iOS-Framework.
Any dependency (external library) you use for building the Framework will become a dependency for the project that will use your framework, unless you can add the source in your Framework.
Also take a look into providing documentation using Doxygen, AppleDoc, etc ;-)
I want to create a community around a current iPhone app I've built. It will allow registered users to upload and download small configuration or settings files, which are used in my app to customize functionality. These files are serialized plists (binary files around 500 bytes), but can be converted to a JSON or XML format if necessary.
I do not need an HTML front-end; I plan for it to be accessed only via my app. Files do not need to be private or secure. I do not plan to store or ask for any user private data--just a login and password.
I'm looking for tips that might get me close to my goals with the least amount of effort - I want to focus on the core functionality of the app, and have this as a stable feature that I can add to in the future if it is useful. I would of course prefer FOSS, but a commercial solution is not out of the question. Things like file sharing sites with apis, login ideas, and so on.
So, what software solutions are out there that I may not be aware of? I know that Drupal has modules to allow user logins. Is there something that would work not as a web app, but as a service only? Dropbox has file sharing and an API, but I'm not sure I could use it the way I'm intending.
In short, I could code this, but would prefer a pre-baked solution that would deal with things I may not have thought of. I am sure there must be something out there which I can use.
More Details, and what I plan on the service offering:
Registration of users via the iPhone, and all that entails (will code the UI myself--I just want an API to connect to)
Viewing of these files quickly and efficiently (the files were built with performance in mind, and this is a free app, so I would like to keep server costs down)
Uploading their own files, with a few integrity checks
Rating the files
Gathering statistics on usage (which files were downloaded most often), etc., to provide a way for the files to be ranked by rating, popularity, etc.
Optional - submitting revised versions of the files (a tree).
Optional but preferred - statistics on users (no. files uploaded, perhaps rewards system for sharing)
I'm just not up to date with current technologies and open source solutions. I have experience in SQL, relational database design, and have built backends in Java, so a custom solution is not out of the question. However, it's been a while, I'm not a security expert, and would prefer to not reinvent the wheel for what is a fairly simple project, so an off-the-shelf solution would be preferred.
Check out www.parse.com!
It is absolutely brilliant for stuff like this.
You may want to look at source versioning systems like SVN or distributed systems like Mercurial or GIT. Both would be much better if the data were serialized to a text format, like JSON or XML as you mentioned.
Registration would need to be done by you of course
Viewing of files (including changes, of course) is quick and efficient. The interface can be done in a number of ways, even simulating command-line.
Uploading files will of course work, and changes made will be stored as diffs. Integrity checks can be done, for example, by Mercurial plugins
Rating the files probably can't be done directly unless you wanted an awkward hack involving parsing change entries or writing a plugin.
Submitting revised versions of files would work as that is the raison d'être of versioning systems.
Some statistics are made available in VCSs.
This is honestly a bit of a strange use for version control systems and not altogether elegant, but sometimes that's what innovation is about.
I suggest TikiWiki .
Pros:
Out-of-the-box all you need to build a community. (See reference below for list of features)
It's FOSS
It has 200 active developers - so it really has a lot of momentum.
Cons:
So many out-of-the-box features that it suffers from feature bloat. Configuration and initial set-up may be complicated.
Not really oriented to mobile platforms.
How can i write a cloud-aware application? e.g. an application that takes benefit of being deployed on cloud. Is it same as an application that runs or a vps/dedicated server? if not then what are the differences? are there any design changes? What are the procedures that i need to take if i am to migrate an application to cloud-aware?
Also i am about to implement a web application idea which would need features like security, performance, caching, and more importantly free. I have been comparing some frameworks and found that django has least RAM/CPU usage and works great in prefork+threaded mode, but i have also read that django based sites stop to respond with huge load of connections. Other frameworks that i have seen/know are Zend, CakePHP, Lithium/Cake3, CodeIgnitor, Symfony, Ruby on Rails....
So i would leave this to your opinion as well, suggest me a good free framework based on my needs.
Finally thanks for reading the essay ;)
I feel a matrix moment coming on... "what is the cloud? The cloud is all around us, a prison for your program..." (what? the FAQ said bring your sense of humour...)
Ok so seriously, what is the cloud? It depends on the implementation but usual features include scalable computing resource and a charge per cpu-hour, storage area etc. So yes, it is a bit like developing on your VPS/a normal server.
As I understand it, Google App Engine allows you to consume as much as you want. The back-end resource management is done by Google and billed to you and you pay for what you use. I believe there's even a free threshold.
Amazon EC2 exposes an API that actually allows you to add virtual machine instances (someone correct me please if I'm wrong) having pre-configured them, deploy another instance of your web app, talk between private IP ranges if you wish (slicehost definitely allow this). As such, EC2 can allow you to act like a giant load balancer on the front-end passing work off to a whole number of VMs on the back end, or expose all that publicly, take your pick. I'm not sure on the exact detail because I didn't build the system but that's how I understand it.
I have a feeling (but I know least about Azure) that on Azure, resource management is done automatically, for you, by Microsoft, based on what your app uses.
So, in summary, the cloud is different things depending on which particular cloud you choose. EC2 seems to expose an API for managing resource, GAE and Azure appear to be environments which grow and shrink in the background based on your use.
Note: I am aware there are certain constraints developing in GAE, particularly with Java. In a minute, I'll edit in another thread where someone made an excellent comment on one of my posts to this effect.
Edit as promised, see this thread: Cloud Agnostic Architecture?
As for a choice of framework, it really doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned. If you are planning on deploying to one of these platforms you might want to check framework/language availability. I personally have just started Django and love it, having learnt python a while ago, so, in my totally unbiased opinion, use Django. Other developers will probably recommend other things, based on their preferences. What do you know? What are you most comfortable with? What do you like the most? I'd go with that. I chose Django purely because I'm not such a big fan of PHP, I like Python and I was comfortable with the framework when I initially played around with it.
Edit: So how do you write cloud-aware code? You design your software in such a way it fits on one of these architectures. Again, see the cloud-agnostic thread for some really good discussion on ways of doing this. For example, you might talk to some services on GAE which scale. That they are on GAE (example) doesn't really matter, you use loose coupling ideas. In essence, this is just a step up from the web service idea.
Also, another feature of the cloud I forgot to mention is the idea of CDN's being provided for you - some cloud implementations might move your data around the globe to make it more efficient to serve, or just because that's where they've got space. If that's an issue, don't use the cloud.
I cannot answer your question - I'm not experienced in such projects - but I can tell you one thing... both CakePHP and CodeIgniter are designed for PHP4 - in other words: for really old technology. And it seems nothing is going to change in their case. Symfony (especially 2.0 version which is still in heavy beta) is worth considering, but as I said on the very beginning - I can not support this with my own experience.
For designing applications for deployment for the cloud, the main thing to consider if recoverability. If your server is terminated, you may lose all of your data. If you're deploying on Amazon, I'd recommend putting all data that you need persisted onto an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) device. This would be data like user generated content/files, the database files and logs. I also use the EBS snapshot on a 5 day rotation so that's backed up itself. That said, I've had a cloud server up on AWS for over a year without any issues.
As for frameworks, I'm giving Grails a try at the minute and I'm quite enjoying it. Built to be syntactically similar to Rails but runs on the JVM. It means you can take advantage of all the Java goodness, like threading, concurrency and all the great libraries out there to build your web application.
I am a ruby on rails developer and I have developed several plugins, may be i will be selling them to some web sites and they can use my plugin in there application. But i want to assure that the plugin code once given to them is not used for any other application, if they do so i must know where is it deployed.
I just need a way to track number of deployments, for a given plugin.
You can't. Ruby is interpreted, so they can simply remove the tracking code from it, and use it where they want. You might want to build C extensions for ruby if you really want resellable components.
You cannot assure it. You can make it unprofitable by creating some obfuscated code, which will limit the use. On assumption that analyzing that code will cost a lot more, than just paying you another license. Of course that doesn't guarantee anything at all.