I am looking into building an intranet based app which can support different mobile platforms.
I have looked into phonegap, sencha touch and jquery mobile. I am confused as to how the business logic can be incorporated on the client side ? Any input will be appreciated.
Phonegap is just a web browser that has an access to native apis. So you can use more or less any technology that a normal web browser can interpret.
With that in mind, for a business logic you have to general options: 1) create an api somewhere on you server and just make ajax calls from you application and/or 2) use javascript. This is the only language that can be used for business logic inside phonegap (beside the native java, objective-c and etc).
Out of all those mobile frameworks available, I would suggest you to go for Sencha Touch with PhoneGap. The reason I prefer Sencha Touch over Jquery Mobile is that Sencha Touch is far more smoother than JQM when it comes to page transition and navigation. Also, the extensive documentation from Sencha gives you a quick start on building mobile apps for both Android and iOS.
You may use PhoneGap if you would like to access any of the native features like Camera, Contacts etc.,
Here are some useful links:
http://www.sencha.com/learn/touch/
http://www.sencha.com/learn/getting-started-with-sencha-touch-2
http://miamicoder.com/sencha-touch-tutorials/
Related
The problem: build a somewhat complex form that submits data to MySQL+PHP back-end. Requirements include:
Accessible from browsers running on mobiles, tablets and desktops
Must be completely platform independent; works well on Edge, Safari, Chrome, and other modern browsers.
Must be implemented so that in the future, native versions can be implemented using the same code-base.
Based on my research, Ionic seems to be the best fit. However, I don't see anything about using Ionic for web-apps on their official website.
Questions:
Can Ionic be used to meet the above requirements? If yes, what is the best way to use Ionic for web-apps? Is there an official guideline from Ionic for this?
How else would you go about meeting the above requirements if not using Ionic?
Thanks.
Ionic is built for developing mobile apps / progressive web apps. If you are looking for something which can be accesses through browsers Angular is the best option. Progressive web apps also will be something you can look into. Except for native functionalities in mobile and routing in browsers , angular code will be reusable.
The title pretty much says it all. I was asked this question today and really didn't know the answer.
Ionic is not intended to build desktop, or even desktop browser based applications.
From the official docs :
Ionic is focused on building native/hybrid mobile apps rather than
mobile websites.
As such, our browser support tends to be whatever Web View API is
available to native apps on a given platform. For Ionic 1.0.0
"uranium-unicorn", that means UIWebView for iOS 7+, and Android 4.1
and up. Windows Phone and FirefoxOS support is on our roadmap.
Even if you implement a browser website using ionic, the rendered output would rather weird.
Infact, Ionic has itself implemented it's website using bootstrap ;)
I am familiar to both Sencha Touch and ExtJs. My next project is web application. I am planning to use Sencha Touch to develop web application, because in sencha touch contains lot of graph components and also touch components events available. Can I use sencha Touch to develop web application?. Please anybody can suggest me. Great appreciate.
The selection of ExtJS or Touch framework is not about web or non-web applications, but about the device you want to run the result on. For desktop, use Ext JS, for mobiles use Sencha Touch.
Both have rich charting.
By web application if you mean HTML client side code your answer will be yes you can.
Sencha touch is by nature HTML based.
For native applications you used builder tools to obtain native ports.
In other words, yes you can develop web applications.
Also (as usual) check out the documentation for both ExtJS and SenchaTouch as they will both describe how to deploy as a web application.
Just a heads up, i've developed on both and Touch Interfaces wouldn't look very good on a web browser, they are designed and optimized for html 5 enabled mobile devices like tablets.
ExtJS however is developed for a desktop web experience, and the components look a lot better on a computer when rendered in an html 5 web page.
We plan to create a hosted web app with AngularJS. As UI Framework we found Ionic and Onsen to work well with AngularJS. Both of this frameworks promote that they are made particularly for Hybrid Apps. But us I understand correctly, both frameworks are based on web technologies. So what are the drawbacks when using the suggested UI frameworks for non Hybrid Apps? Is it mainly the Browser support?
Thanks
Well, both Ionic and Onsen are made particularly for Hybrid Mobile Apps. You just won't be able to use it even for tablet apps without customization (If I am wrong, please correct me) just because they target the limited viewport and incorporate phone UX patterns.
Also, they are made with PhoneGap in mind (the apps will be hosted in the WebView component), and addresses some common WebView problems, e.g GPU acceleration for better performance.
If you need just some UI framework for a simple Web App you'd better have a look at Twitter Boostrap or Zurb Foundation. For a complex case you may even consider Sencha instead of Angular.
There is a part of Ionic that expects the Cordova/PhoneGap Device plugin to be installed. It helps with displaying on Android and iOS appropriately, as well as increasing the size of header bars for iOS 7. That wont be an issue for web though, since you'll have the browser's "chrome" taking up that space.
You may loose some of the buttery smoothness in things like page transitions because the template files need to travel over a (often cellular) connection to the internet, but your app will most certainly work if built with Ionic or Onses over the web.
Things changed considerably over last few months.
Both frameworks now support splitview so they can be used for tablet devices. Subjectively Onsen UI has a better support (it is much more configurable), but Ionic is also not bad. This can translate to smaller desktop browsers screens.
You should also consider that Onsen UI has a dedicated desktop browsers support (all web-kit browsers). Ionic framework will also work on desktop browsers, but it was not fully tested or optimized for such environment.
Biggest problem here is that both frameworks were never meant to be used on larger screens. They look oversized and bloated. If you ever worked with jQuery Mobile (on desktop browsers) you will understand this problem.
There is nothing stopping you from doing that - it might even be a smart approach for a mobile first design approach. The advantage is that you could rapidly iterate an idea an then invest in a native or platform specific app depending on user feedback/metrics.
The main drawback would be the user expectations for your UI and application logic which are different for a web page and a native app. For example the back button will be duplicated in the browser and in your header. You could use some platform specific CSS or configurations to hide it. Then there is your application state and user data - will you save it in local storage, session or database? This depends on your app and best judgement.
There will be some browser issues which may not be addressed in the core of Ionic and Onsen because they are not targeted to work with IE6/7 (see angular browser support), for example, but you can resolve those by having a graded browser support policy.
We are in the process of analyzing the best platform for a Hybrid mobile application. The requirement will be an app that will be available on Android/iPhone/BB devices. On all other decvices, the mobile website can be accessed from the inbuilt browser.
I understand Sencha Touch does cover Android, iPhone and Blackberry devices - which means the mobile website will not be available from the browsers in the other devices (non-webkit browsers like Windows,Palm....)
While Phonegap has the compatibility across different browsers. I'm looking to see what advantages are of using Sencha over Phonegap considering all other features?
The main difference is that PhoneGap is a framework which does not include an inbuilt UI framework. Instead, it just acts as a cross-platform wrapper for the native APIs, exposing you a Javascript based API to access native capabilities. With PhoneGap, you have the option of using pure HTML5, or using a UI framework such as Sencha Touch 2 itself, jQueryMobile, jQTouch, Kendo UI, etc. Sencha Touch on the other hand, is a UI framework, but it does not have the out of the box capability to expose a cross platform JavaScript API for the native capabilities.
From the below statement from you, I suppose you do not plan to access any native APIs in your application, and what you will be writing is a pure mobile web application.
The requirement will be an app that will be available on
Android/iPhone/BB devices. On all other devices, the mobile website
can be accessed from the inbuilt browser.
If that is the case, I don't see any reason to use PhoneGap for your application. You could just write it entirely using Sencha Touch 2, and use it's build and packaging tools to package it for the target platforms.
However, if you are planning to use native APIs, then Sencha Touch 2 alone will not be able to provide you that capability, in which case you should wrap Sencha Touch 2 in a PhoneGap application. Have a look at this video from Sencha Docs regarding this http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2.2.0/#!/video/native-apis-from-touch