I am starting a new project where we need to make entering web data forms an easy experience on mobile.
Currently our web site data forms cannot be styled and made mobile friendly they also reside behind a company firewall, however we can do POSTS via XML to submit a data form.
I'm currently undecided to which approach would be best.
Rebuild the forms natively on the iPhone using iOS components
Somehow create a local HTML5 Data form on the mobile, and then have the iPhone parse this and submit via XML.
Has anyone done similar on mobile in the past, it would be great to hear of your experiences, one key piece to this project is that we also need to have the data forms offline, and have them posted when the device is back online.
Based on the background information you've given, I believe that the only way to go is with the native UI components. Here's why:
You've stated the need for offline form "submission". You will have a much easier time if you have a native form that stores the information somewhere and then submits it when connected.
You've stated the desire to provide an easy experience on mobile. For that, I would naturally recommend native UI controls. Your custom "native" web controls are more likely to be confusing and difficult to use. Contrast that with UIKit which presumably has a lot of research behind it (and millions of satisfied users to back it.)
In the long run, it will be easier to integrate with the rest of the device if you use native controls.
For making XML requests, I recommend the ASIHTTPRequest library.
In my opinion, the better option would be to recreate the forms using the iOS components. It would be much more user friendly, and faster, if done right.
Related
We've built an app through Flutter and realising that some of our user behaviour is best created for larger screens, where people are creating best on desktop. I've seen that the codebase is viable for transporting to a web experience. We want to avoid the desktop app and build for a browser.
Has anyone had experience with building for web browsers using Flutter?
What's been your experience? How good is the codebase for creating things such as:
Messengers
Posting and threads
Spaces, like Pinterest folders or Padlet like these - NewHope Crowdsource Space
This is the app on the store if that helps.
I'd greatly appreciate any feedback, thoughts or experiences you've had. I'm wondering whether to invest in Flutter for web browser or whether I need to go back to JS.
Thank you
We're exploring whether to develop the website through a different language and looking for people's experiences if they've attempted this.
The experience is not much different than mobile development, if you're used to it, really I recommend you usage this variant. Only one source code for all platforms.
In addition, the use of libraries is practically the same. The only thing that changes is that it compiles to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I only recommend taking care of the adaptability to different screen sizes, using mediaQuery (height, width) and Expanded Widgets.
The rest stays the same, your HTTP requests (Dio is an excellent option). To work the logic layer also the BLoC design pattern helps a lot.
I been look into things about PWA (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaS_5jUeh_0) and it does mention something called "App Shell Architecture",
My Uncertainties:
Can Progressive Web Applications support other Architectures such as MVC? or in order to implement PWA feature we need to change our Legacy Architecture to the Architecture that design for PWA?
Is it possible for us to continue use the Architecture that we are comfortable (in my case: MVC architecture) to implement PWA?
I'm migrating an MVC, Razor heavy app to be more PWA like, ultimately I want it full PWA with offline capability but there are a lot of things I need to change before I get there however hardly any of it requires changes to the existing MVC code!
The key factor, to answer your question, is building in MVC will not prevent you building a PWA and if you're happy with that architecture then carry on using it.
What matters more is how your pages are rendered (particularly if you want to go full offline) a heavy Razor based site for example will I think make life a lot more tricky, especially if you have dynamic elements on the page that rely on callbacks to the server.
So the first thing I'm doing is moving a lot of my functionality into the Javascript and uploading all the page data up front as JSON. Then I can have things happen dynamically with a lot less reliance on the sever.
Obviously saving and updating data still relies on the server and I've not got to that point yet, in terms of how to handle things in offline mode.
If it helps my starting point was to reduce callbacks to the server to the bare minimum required, once I get there then I'll know what I have left to deal with, including all the Razor pages!
You can use MVC to build a PWA. App shell is nothing but the skeleton of your page which you use to load your content. That has nothing to do with whether you use MVC or not. It is recommended and easy if you use SPA for PWA which make the app shell cachin easy. Again there is no hard rule. If you follow the recommendations, it will make your life easier.. recommendations are made for a reason!
I understand from threads in this forum and the Google GWT forum that in the GWT world you typically load just a single page and then what appears to a user to be a different page is just the same page with it's content being updated by user actions. A lot of posts imply that you develop your app as you would a desktop application. That sounds easy if you have done desktop development but I am coming from a pure Web services/ Servlets/ Struts background and want to see a very basic example that shows the proper way to implement a GWT app where you show a user a txt box and button and when they click the button, the view is replaced with 2 different components.
There are plenty of basic apps I have done and plenty of complex multipage type ones but I just one that takes me past the click a button to see a message type app to the next level.
Any links to such an example would be welcome
I recommend to study Activities & Places design pattern. It is the best approach, in my view, for large applications with multiple views. It provides a lot of important functionality "out of the box", like browser history management, support for tokens, efficient memory management, etc.
You may want to look into the Model-View-Presenter pattern (MVP). Using this pattern correctly will greatly decouple your application, allowing you to create views that are not only highly modular and disposable, but are very easy to swap out and change.
In fact, Google fully recommends the MVP pattern when developing GWT applications. They provide a full example and walkthrough of a MVP GWT application here, which I imagine is based off of a Google I/O presentation given on best GWT application architecture practices back in 2009.
I've been following this pattern with my latest GWT project and it's working out extremely well. It's very easy to add, remove and swap views.
I need your advice. We have an already working web resource management application, we use the usal tools html, css, php, mysql, the users logs in, create a new issue and data is saved/retrieved in/from a sever, everything ok.
The thing is that they ask me to develop an iPhone app using objective-c to emulate the functionality. Now, I have some thoughts on this:
One aproach is to just make the ajax optimizations so the website runs like any other iphone web app, honestly not convenient for me, they'll hire a web developer.
The native app could request the web pages, parse html and maybe get the values to display them, lets say ... in a tableView
The last one and wich I thing should be the most "simple" is to call the php scripts that will make requests to the database and get the data without tags.
I've diggen in the said php scripts and discovered that they have embeded html, so, does that mean there's no way to scape from parsing html?
Please give ideas to clear this problem, thanks in advance.
While scraping might seem like a quick and easy way to get the job done, it's one I'd really not recommend using. This is because at any time the HTML served by your web application can and will change, and that will potentially break your application, which will waste a lot of time making little fixes here and there, releasing updates to your app with these fixes and so on.
I'd recommend working with your web app guys to come up with a proper REST API so it makes things easier for you and your iPhone app.
The mix of data/HTML isn't going to be pretty.
You can do some sort of clean up using Objective-C string functions, but the code will be pretty one-off and crufty.
Instead of calling those scripts straight off the server, you might consider adding a second, parser-like PHP script to work as a middleman. You call it, it calls the original script and returns a data structure that you can work with, like JSON.
I am working with a friend on building a web site, in general this web site will be a custom web app along with a very custom social network type of thing..
Currently I have a mock-up site that uses simple PHP with AJAX and JSON and JQUERY and I love how it works, I love the way it all fits together.
But for a mock-up I did not implement any of the Social Network design patterns such as a login, rating, groups etc..
This brought me to a higher level of decision making requirement, I need to decide if I want to develop all this functionality by hand or use some kind of a framework.
I spent this entire day researching, and it would seem that using Drupal and such frameworks will make the Social Network part easy (overlooking the customization requirement for now..) but will make client side Web App development less so.
I found some other frameworks that are more developer friendly (customizable) such as Zend and Symfony etc.. but these seem to take allot of the power from the client and implement it in the server side, to me this seems a waste (and an unjustified performance bottleneck) ..
Finally I found Aptana Jaxer framework that seems to think the same way I feel.
That said it seems a bit under-developed, I didn't find modules for a social network and the community around it seems thin.. (searching Jaxer in StackOverflow returns few results)
So other then making server side DB comm a bit simpler it does not help me greatly..
My requirements are a good facility to develop web apps on while containing all the user centric logic usually used for social networks in advance.
What would you recommend?
EDIT:
OK, lats fine tune this question, after considering this abit further, is there a good down loadable source of a social network site in PHP that I can work around in building my web app? (I really like using JQUERY AJAX JSON etc..)
if you want to develop a social networking site from scratch, i recommend using zend-framework as a server side framework and jquery as a client side framework.
they have a lot of library which you can use such as zend_auth,zend_acl for user authentication system and Zend_Search_Lucene for search facilities and zend_gdata for youtube videos and so on.
but you can also use one of the several social networking engines available out there.
here is a link:
http://www.best-php-scripts.com/social_networking.htm
I think it depends on the goal your trying to achieve.
Personally, I tend to like to keep things simple and to decouple complex
things in smaller components, so it's easy to stay in control when you'll
incrementally add new features.
Ajax or a server-side framework ? I'd say that they're not necessary overlapping
each others. However some (server-side) frameworks tends to wrap everything in a
single zipped package to make things easier for beginners. I personally don't
like this avenue because it will make your web app dependable on this framework.
Thus, nothing prevents you to use one client-side framework for the presentation
logic and another one for server-side/business logic.
Hth,
Etienne