iOS : load content for UIWebView from Server - ios

I'd like to load content (HTML / CSS, Javascript - all files packed in a zip-file) into my application folder and runs it in an UIWebView. I guess this is possible, however I'm not sure if Apple allows it.
So Is the dynamic loading and storing of HTML pages generally allowed?
Thanks a lot.

Yes you can. Loading of web pages that way is fine as far as I know. I am working on a project that uses this zip archive tool to unpack the zip. It is a object oriented C wrapper on minizip
http://code.google.com/p/ziparchive/source/browse/trunk/ZipArchive.h

Related

How to create a JS library with remote assets?

I'm building a JS SDK (Library) and I'm planning on giving the users only a JS loader which in turn should load all the assets from a CDN (so we can deploy new code without asking clients to download new versions of the SDK).
The Assets include all the SDK Code, some CSS files, config files and some graphics.
The Javascript code depends on the config files (which should be loaded prior to using the SDK) and the library load should fail if any of the assets fails (for example, a jpeg can't be downloaded).
Just a note - I can't use an IFrame as I need to interact with the hosting page.
How can I accomplish this? Any best practices?
Thanks
easyXDM is a Javascript library that enables you as a developer to easily work around the limitation set in place by the Same Origin Policy, in turn making it easy to communicate and expose javascript API’s across domain boundaries.

Using XDK, how do I link to another page? Hyperlinks are disabled

Edit: so apparently adding class="button" make it work... Can someone provide a reference on what other classes are there? We can't find any information on this.. Thanks
We are making an app in HTML5 using XDK, it has quite a few different views. We were planning to just link to another html page each time we want to go to a different view. But we quickly found out that hyperlinking does not work, is disabled, and button does not link either.
One of the people in my group said she saw an example about having a bunch of and then just show and hide them and use that as UI navigation... is that the only way?
Thanks in advance!
The Intel XDK doesn't insert any class definitions or require that you use a specific framework. It is a tool for assembling an HTML5 hybrid mobile app using the CSS, HTML and JS files that you supply.
If you look at the samples and the default "blank" project that is created when you create a new project you'll see that there may be references to one or more of the following "phantom" JS files:
intelxdk.js
cordova.js
xhr.js
The first two (intelxdk.js and cordova.js) are special "device API" JavaScript libraries. You won't actually find them in your project directory, they are automatically included when you use the emulator and when you build your project (which "wraps up" your HTML5 code and assets into a native wrapper that is specific to the target you are building -- it does not compile anything, it just converts it into a hybrid native/HTML5 container app that can be installed on the target platform that you built for).
The third one is a special helper JS library for dealing with CORS issues from within your app.
None of these three JS files define any classes or HTML tags, etc. They simply implement target-specific device APIs that consist of JavaScript on the "top end" and native code on the "bottom end." Your application only sees and interacts with the JavaScript interface, and only with the APIs that you need to use (which is totally optional).
For an intro to all of this, please see the Intel XDK Documentation page.
So, that means you determine which frameworks and structure your app takes. In other words, if you want to use Bootstrap and jQuery you can do so. If you decide to use the App Designer or the App Starter tools, they will define some classes that impact your layout. However, you are not required to use these tools to define your HTML and CSS, you can do it by hand or use your favorite UI framework library.
Keep in mind that your code is not being rendered by a desktop browser but the embedded "webview" that is part of the device. These webviews don't have the same memory and CPU resources that you're used to working with in a desktop browser, so you need to learn to be "lean and mean" for the best results. You are using HTML5 technologies to build a mobile app -- not creating a web site on a phone.
Hope this helps, please see our HTML5 web site for more background material. It's a little slim right now, but we're adding examples and background material as time and resources permit.
Hope that helps...

Performance in MVC web application

I am struggling to get some performance in my MVC application.I am loading a partial page (popup) which is taking hardly 500ms. But each time the popup loads it also downloads 2 jQuery files as well.
is it possible to use the jQuery from cache or from parent page?
I have attached the image in red which shows 2 additional request to server.
In order to improve the performance you can try with the following approaches:
see if your application server supports GZip and configure the application/server to return the responses always archived in Gzip
Use minified version of JQuery
there are also Packing libraries where you can pack all the imported resources, such as CSS files and JS files, and the browser will do only 1 request per resource type. For instance, in Java we have a library called packtag.
In general, I recommend you using Google Chrome browser and its performance analyzer. It will give you good hints.
In the Bundle config use this code
BundleTable.EnableOptimizations = true;
and also indclude both files in single bundle.
Does the popup use an iframe or does it's content just get added to the DOM of the current page?
If it gets added to the current page you could try just adding the script references to the parent page instead. It might not always be the best idea if the parent page has no need for those two files, but if the parent page also uses the jQuery validation then the popup will be able to use the parent's reference to the script file.
For an iframe I'd suggest looking at Gzip and minification to make the scripts load faster.

Dump my MVC site to static files

I want to build a simple site with MVC but then render the "pages" and corresponding "assets" (js, css, images, etc) to what one might call a "static site".
In other words, I don't want to deploy to an IIS server that supports MVC. I simply want to build the site in MVC then somehow parse those pages into static html/css/etc files and upload the site to a regular LAMP host.
Is there an easy way to automate this? NuGet package? Binary? MVC extension like maybe a handler add-on that can render out the static site in a single pass?
About 10 years back, I used to download whole websites for offline use using HTTrack Website Copier. May be you could download your own website which gives you nice hierarchy of your static web pages. If you think all your webpages are reachable through the homepage links, menu links etc then you can download most of your website. Basically you can google for web crawlers/ offline browsers/website downloaders etc. and run them to get your job done.
Alternatively if you know the pattern of urls, you could give it to download manager to download them. Not sure if it works with your website, but I do it sometimes.
HTH
If your site depends on a database or some other dynamic source it will be close to impossible to dump all possible combinations of pages into static files. If on the other hand your site is pretty much static, saving the rendered HTML/JS/CSS source into files and uploading it to a LAMP server won't be too hard.
You may wanna look at Pretzel, a .Net static site generator.
Update: Apparently it doesn't work on ASP.Net projects: Issue #123. It only supports Razor language for authoring content pages.
If the reason for doing this is performance related why not just use output caching and the like, that way the pages will be extremely fast (you could set the cache timeout to a very long period of time) and you don't need to run some tool to do the conversion and have to store your html separate to your source code.
Of course you will still need to run IIS/.net
You have three options:
Create your website using plain html, css, jquery and images. You can use Visual Studio Code as IDE to create the files. One issue might be to manage common header/footer for your website. But you can solve it by injecting html header/footer using jquery.
Use a CMS (content management system) like Umbraco to host your static site. Umbraco indexes and caches pages to improve performance. You have great control on what to publish on your website etc.
Create the website using .Net + MVC and use tools like HTTrack to download a static copy of the website. You can even automate the process using commands and triggering it after every deployment or build etc.

Is there a framework to cache HTML pages on iOS?

I'm looking to cache HTML pages inside an application that uses UIWebView.
Is there a framework that will allow me to do this and if not what method would you recommend?
On the server side these files are being seen as PHP so I'd just be caching whatever the file gives back out.
I used RNCachingURLProtocol , a way to do drop-in offline caching for UIWebView
Reference:
http://robnapier.net/blog/offline-uiwebview-nsurlprotocol-588

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