Is there a way to integrate codenameone component in a native activity/fragment?.
The idea is having a codenameone library, that we use its native compilation as a library in an existing native project?
Many thanks for the reply
Maybe but probably not.
Codename One was very much designed to take over. The reason is that cross platform embedding is really difficult as the OSs have a very different concept of application embedding and lifecycle.
You can embed a native widget into Codename One "easily" but that's probably not enough.
Since in Android everything is an activity you might be able to hack something by packaging two apps into one APK and moving back and forth with the Codename One app. I wouldn't recommend it since we make a lot of assumptions and this might not work. You won't be able to do the same on other platforms either.
One strategy some developers took is to have two distinct apps that communicate between them via the cloud or via app URI calls (or both). This is a workable cross platform approach but it's also a bit painful and it isn't seamless to the user.
I'm looking to add functionality to the built in Java SDK classes beyond the CLDC 1.1 standard which is where the API seems to be compatible with. Specifically looking to implement StringBuffer#replace(...)
What is the best way to go about this?
Thanks
cldc1.1 is a very old standard. Codename One supports far more than what that standard had but retained the filename due to legacy issues.
There is a guide on how to use the Codename One source and contribute it back to the git repository: http://codenameone.com/blog/how-to-use-the-codename-one-sources.html
However, the main issue is the need to fix this for all OS's which is pretty challenging.
To just fix the stubs for the method to appear to compile you can change the project here. However, this will only work for targets where the method is already there (Android, JavaSE etc.).
You will then need to make sure there is an implementation for all other targets:
For Windows you will need to fix the ikvm target and fork, for iOS you will need to fix the code in the JavaAPI directory under the VM directory for JavaScript you will need to contribute your changes to TeaVM if required.
For older platforms you will need to implement your changes into the retroweaver support although this might not be as relevant.
I am a python programmer looking to make my first mobile app. I'd like to make make an app for both iOS and Android that looks and feels native. I thought I'd start with a simple iPhone app, just to see how everyting works. Mono seems like the obvious solution. However, I was surprised to find that almost all of the example Monotouch code I found, as well as the answers here on Stackoverflow, relied heavily on the IOS frameworks, essentially making the code not cross-platform at all. For example, I was looking into using a timer. All the examples I read use NSTimer. Surely this is possible to do in C# itself so that that part is cross platform? But then, why do all these people use NSTimer?
So, my question is, how cross platform is Mono development for IOS/Android? Is it still worth considering for smallish apps, or only for very large apps with lots of business logic?
Your question is too general. I'll answer it for two scenarios:
Specific examples
If you are looking for how do create timers, create arrays, traverse lists, then why not just look for regular .NET examples and compile this into a single class library that can be in both projects.
Sharing code as a whole
If you just mean in general sharing of code between the two platforms, you should look at frameworks that already have the templates and examples created for you. Two such patterns are http://www.monocross.net/ (MVC) and mvvmcross (MVVM). This can help you architect your project from the beginning to support cross-platform development (iOS, Droid, Wp7, desktop, etc).
There are timers, arrays, and strings in the .NET Base Class Library. As you have seen, there are some in the Cocoa library that MonoTouch wraps. For example you have your regular run of the mill string in .NET, but in monotouch you also have the option of NSString. I think to answer your question, the reason people may use the iOS specific types sometimes, is either because they weren't trying to make that code cross-platform and it was a matter of preference, or they had to do something specifically that required the use of that type which wouldn't be the case for everyone.
Mono's purpose isn't just to help with cross-platform development. I come from a C#/.NET background so even if I was building an app with one screen and two buttons, I would use MonoTouch because I would rather use C# with the .NET BCL than Obj-C. But that is my own personal choice and enough of a deciding factor, for me.
EDIT
I added the links.
I think the key point is that in order to use Mono and NOT use platform specific types etc like NSSTring you need a platform specific wrapper (abstraction layer) that lets you write code that only uses Mono types.
i.e. You are asking about using Mono but what you actually need are MonoTouch and MonoDroid (the frameworks referenced by #valdetero, depend on having those wrappers underpinning them).
I'm currently investigating the alternatives for crossplatform development for Android and iPhone (Windows 8 could be a nice addition). The app is basically a "map with an asociated app", and certainly not a game.
Searching here I see many outdated advice and tools from 2010/2011, but since then Apple has changed their policies and surely new things have appeared.
My current list and light research (might have facts wrong) is:
Monotouch/Monodroid: .NET (Mono) framework. Create "native" apps on both platforms. Requires rebuilding UI code (or similar things).
Appcelerator: Javascript framework to compile native apps.
Corona: Similar to Appcelerator.
Phonegap: Similar idea, but looks like it uses a wrapper to appify HTML5 content
SenchaTouch: Another HTML5 based platform.
Wink: Yet another HTML5 toolkit.
XVLM: Android to ObjC compiler, probably creating ugly iOS apps.
Unity3D: For games only.
Moai: For games only.
So, there are three main ideas, with some frameworks implementing each, it seems to me:
Have an abstraction layer over native iOS/Android code and build for each platform using the provided layer. (Monotouch, Unity3D)
Use HTML5 (coding in Javascript) and some kind of wrapper to "appify" the web content. (PhoneGap,Sencha,Wink)
Code using a framework that will output as a compilation pass (or similar) a native app for each supported platform (Moai, XVLM,Appcelerator,Corona)
The questions:
Is there a fourth idea I haven't yet found?
Is there any blatant mistake in my research for any of the specified frameworks?
Is there any known problem for map integration with any of these ideas or specific frameworks?
Only a partial answer:
Ad 2. Appcelerator / Titanium is more than just HTML5. I read this pretty extensive comparison between PhoneGap and Titanium the other day on Hackers News. I found it very informative. The link points to the HN comments, the link to the actual article is at the top.
My main experience is with Mono for Android and MonoTouch, so I can't personally speak much to the other options. I personally find it to be the best option there is, as it allows you to share a large amount of your code across the platforms (even extending to non-mobile platforms if you stick with .NET), while still allowing for a 100% native UI, which is extremely important. If you're looking for resources on getting started, I have this video which discusses approaches and libraries for sharing a lot of code across platforms, and also this book which covers the same thing, but also expands to talk about how to do things like store data, use maps, access the network, etc.
I also want to mention MonoGame, which is absent from your list. MonoGame is an open source XNA implementation that sits on top of Mono to allow you to target iOS/Android/Max OS X.
From what I have experienced, if you want to have a native app go Mono, if you don't need native go PhoneGap. Native is best of the UI is very important, ie games or fairly graphical apps. But from business type app, CRUD, Phone gap works well.
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I try to find a way to develop real native mobile apps, cross-platform. The amount of tools I found is huge, very huge.
All of the tools I have tried 'said' that the end result will be native, but in fact it isn't true. It is an executable with a webbrowser in it and some extra native layer/framwork to device specific features.
The reason I want a real native app is:
Speed and compact
Avoid browser issues
Market acceptance
Avoid easy/'script kiddie" reverse engineering
The products I have tried:
Appcelerator (does not work correctly on my system)
PhoneGap (does not create REAL native apps)
Embarcadero radPHP EX2 (uses PhoneGap)
Embarcadero radStudio EX2 (cannot create mobile/android apps?)
Adobe Flash Builder (Works very well but relies on Air, so apps are huge and no
native devices such as vibration (posible, but must write it
yourself)
Flash Develop (but same as Adobe Flash Builder)
..... and some others ;-) like moSync......
Currently I have downloaded "RhoStudio" but has some doubts about it because in the introduction video they talk about the things that I don't want.
Target directions are in the first place Android, iOS and maybe in the future Windows Phone.
Note: I don't have a Mac so I cannot compile it on a Mac.
Is what I want impossible or is there such product around that can do this?
EDIT:
See my answer, the answer is NO!
After 2 years asking this question I can say: NO, it is NOT possible, it's a myth.
All products I have tried use some kind of wrapping or use a second language as a layer to the call the native stuff. Although the libraries are native, the main program is not. The latest answer of Cosku with smartface.io is a good example, they claim it is native but it is NOT.
Why is it so difficult? The problem is the programming language (differences in language that makes it complex) that is required for a platform. It is too complex to translate a second language into the platform's main language and it's specific libraries, you can only achieve this by wrapping things with native binaries. Second obstacle is the needed compiler that must be able to run cross-platform.
But why rely on a second language or third-party development tool to build apps when the output is mostly the same is bad, the problem is perfectly illustrated in this image:
http://xkcd.com/927/
The image is about standards, but that's what happen, creating a new standard for a standard. For example, when using PhoneGap, you have to learn the basics of the PhoneGap API. You rely on a 'new standard' calling PhoneGap. The problem with this is that you completely rely on PhoneGap support and it existence. It can introduce a second weakness in the lifecycle of an app.
IMO, if you want to wrap things to make it cross-platform it is not a smart idea to rely on third-party products and libraries. Better is to write a wrapper yourself, like I did and skip the bloat. A real benefit of this all is that you wrote the wrapper code yourself and you understand underlying structures. Besides it is easier to extend or change and you can skip the things you don't need.
Today I create and design the UI of an app in the longest existing and stable 'language' HTML with a javascript interface. The app can also run in a browser too and does not break when there is a specific function missing, like vibrate for example. You can not get the same results with phonegap, try it! You can design the app with responsive techniques at ease like a normal website (try this in Android for example ;-)). Technically, it can run everywhere, on any platform in a browser or webview but don't use any special Mobile javascript libraries! You don't need these special libraries, really, use the 'normal' library versions instead.
I have wrote a compiler/obfuscator for it to 'pack' the UI-source into just one file that will be loaded by the native shell. This is to protect the source, so it is not easy to view or modify the source.
The only thing I have to do, to support the app platform is write a native wrapper for it. If a platform dies for some reason (for example Windows Mobile in the past), I only have to write a new wrapper for it. This is easier to do than write the whole program again from scratch. Besides, when there is a new platform it can also run in the platforms browser too.
If your app not rely on specific hardware (like a game) or can run without special hardware requirements, this is the way to go to extend the life-cycle of your app. Use HTML5 and javascript to design the GUI and use a native shell to use specific OS features.
Is it slow? I have to say no. At least don't use any bulky and bloated special designed mobile javascript library stuff and don't use the click event on touchscreen devices, use touchstart instead. Also the HTML engines will/are improved these days and there is better support for HTML5 features that enables you to write powerful HTML5 webapps without the need to implement this in a native language.
IMO, this the way to go (for me) and my journey to find the best way develop mobile apps cross-platform and to extend the life-cycle. Hopefully, it can help you too to decide what is the best to do.
For cross-platform native iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows apps, check out Xamarin. Code in C#, compile to native. For iOS, you can leverage the XCode tools for app layout, and Xamarin Studio integrates very cleanly with it.
And for the sake of completeness, PhoneGap has a worthy (yes, WebView based) competitor in TRIGGER.IO. While it's approach is similar to PhoneGap/Cordova, it improves the API for accessing native functionality, simplifies push notifications, and performs much faster cloud builds.
I am not associated with either of these products in any way... I just like them both.
Have you tried www.codenameone.com? It's open source, java based, only need eclipse or netbeans to develop.
Firstly
Appcelerator (does not work correctly on my system)
Is there a certain issue your facing ? are getting java errors or something, might not have been setup correctly.
Short answer is no, you have to have some level of abstraction in order to achieve this, java and objective-c are completely different languages, as well as Android and IOS SDK's having different methods, procedures, styles, design's etc. There is no way to have something work on both without there being a middle layer to convert or render.
Appcelerator will be the closet thing to what your looking for as its not a webview wrapper like the others, true it does interpret javascript, but because its not wrapped in a webview you avoid the browser issues.
Speed and compact comes more down how you code the app more than what its coded on, true Titanium apps will be bigger in size because of the library but that doesn't make it bad as such, the benefits of getting 2 apps far out weighs the extra few megabytes I would think.
I'm pretty sure all of these tools have market acceptance as they wouldn't be successful without it, again for the likes of apples requirements its down to the way you design it, not the tool in the background.
If you want to use IOS you will need a mac, if you want to publish in the app store alone you need xcode and the built project to use the application loader, I'm not aware of any tool (even the webview wrappers) that don't require you to have the IOS SDK as it can't run in the simulator, package the app or run any of the code without it.
If you want to make apps you have 2 choices, learn each platform or use one of these tools, if there was some magic tool that did everything I guarantee it would be the most popular thing on the planet and you would have heard about it / found it.
This is one reason why "the cloud" is so popular. Instead of writing your app several times over, you write all of the functionality on a server. The actual "apps" are then simply your user interface to the functionality, which can be really simple depending on your needs. If it is that simple, then you could write the apps separately for each platform, but they would all use the same "cloud" backend.
If I am not mistaken, this is representative of what most apps by companies who have a cloud architecture do, and is also why many require a data connection.
I don't think that it is possible to write once and run everywhere without some kind of wrapper or layer, this is due to the fact that each platform has separate APIs and even programming languages. You would be hard pressed to write one set of source code that runs natively on both Apple and Android devices, for example. This is not to say that it isn't technically possible, desktop operating systems have had such cross-compiling portability for years with C/C++, and Java only made that much easier. Of course, the engineers of Mobile operating systems don't seem to share a vision of interoperable APIs.
To conclude, I would recommend A) writing the app twice (awful I know, but it will provide the reliablity of native execution on both devices, and can be done with minimal pain) or B) breaking down and using one of the "script-kiddie" frameworks. These actually may not be that bad if your app is simple enough, and it may not be that reverse-engineerable at all. If anyone has any suggestions as to the best "near-native" cross platform framework, that would be useful.
Well, there are several things to consider, if you want native look and feel there are frameworks like Sencha(www.sencha.com) and Kendo UI(http://www.kendoui.com/) that simulate it on JavaScript side. I found them both good looking on Android and iPhone but no support for Windows Phone yet.
If you are looking for real native widgets combined with HTML you can look into MoSync's Native UI(http://www.mosync.com/documentation/manualpages/jsnativeui-library), which support windows phone Metro UI too, or Titanium(http://docs.appcelerator.com/titanium/2.1/index.html).
Anyway one other thing is that you can use packagers like Phonegap or MoSync or AppMobi(which I think uses something similar to PhoneGap build) to wrap your app and put it on App markets. from these list PhoneGap especially is not designed to provide you with any specific UI functionality although I have seen some attempts to add tab bar plugins to Phonegap.