Has anybody got any real world stories build mobile web sites with NetBiscuits?
Someone told me it was the next big thing in mobile development (http://www.netbiscuits.com/home) and it looks pretty good from their site. Just wondered if anybody (besides them) has actually used it.
From a few months time working with it, I can say that they're indeed one of the best (if not the best) out there. The support is also insanely quick and good.
Only thing making me stop using it is the price. Especially if you're a small company and want to use their POI feature.
However I have yet to find a good replacement. May end up rolling my own version...
Edit: Related question.
They have created an entire xml (bml) based markup language that emulates html that has a very steep learning curve. I would seriously reconsider using it.
I have seen it working nicely. It also supports ASP.NET controls SDK that can be used to write ASP.NET app from Visual Studio. Once this app is deployed on your premise, you can use live bridge agent to connect this app to a Live Bridge server that Net Biscuits hosts. Your app is called a backend app in this case. This is a very useful feature when you do want to have Forms capability in your app and also want it to be accessible on NetBiscuits platform.
Check http://kb.netbiscuits.com/tactile/edc/livebridge_help.html. BiscuitML is also easier to grasp.
Look out for performance issues though. Customers in Australia have had response time issues - probably due to the Cloud Platform being located in USA/UK.
Related
When do you think is best to to use a mobile App Maker (Ex: Appery.io) and when to code using a framework (Ex: Ionic)?
Of course, that coding with a framework doesn't tie you to any App Maker label... But, besides that, any other matter I should consider.
I need to start a simple project that querys a some REST API and have some doubts.
So I thought about posting here to open my head to someone who has walked this road before.
I don't mean this to be an open ended question on what is the best framework and comparing them all. I am just trying to establish is it really necessary to go down the heavier more complicated frameworks or can I get a mature long term solution using something like Appery?
Thanks!
When it comes to mobile apps, and as in your case, apps that load dynamic data from server, it is usually better to go for mobile app frameworks rather than, for online app builders. There can be multiple reasons for this :
App builders usually come with a lot of features, but they almost always fail for some Custom client requirements.
They usually tend to cater the need for static apps, when it comes to dynamic apps that have a lot of data manipulation stuff, you should prefer your own framework and logic to do so..
You can almost everytime modify / tweak a framework, You can't do so with an appbuilder.
You aren't sharing your code on cloud [Matters if you are working for some critical organization / client].
You have total control over your code / view. You can tweak it, twist it and almost guarantee total ownership. All you are bound to is the limitation your framework imposes.
You can mix and match frameworks, that doesn't applies for an appbuilder.
These are some of my quick thoughts, there can be [and are] many more reasons for switching towards a mobile framework..
AppMakers are generally there as tools for Rapid Prototyping. These days they market that you can make production apps using Appmakers but when you start using them you will notice that one or some other requirement you have cannot be implemented. In my experience, app development time seems to be less for AppMakers but it is generally more. On the other hand Mobile App Frameworks provide a lot of flexibility and code reusability too.
I am creating a website with a friend to try and make some money. Basically, we want to let users aggregate data from different social networking site's APIs (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and do some cool things with the data.
My non-developer friend is sold on the Google App Engine because it costs nothing at first, and then you pay as your traffic/data increases. I am torn. I like being able to bootstrap the business like that and have no startup costs (other than time) but I am worried about learning a whole new "programming world" as Joel Spolsky would put it.
I am so comfortable with C#, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server that I think moving to something like Java or Python on top of BigTable would end up taking about 3x longer to develop (if not more).
Can anyone give me some guidance on this? Basically, I am wondering if there is any way I can have the following with the Microsoft stack:
Free hosting up to some limit of traffic
Ability to scale out at a cost similar to what Google offers with GAE (maybe the hosting service would need to have support for a good scalable persistence solution--like Couch DB?)
For #1, I am OK if that means hosting it on my own server for the ALPHA/BETA phases. For #2 I am hoping that there is a good hosting service out there who can put me on shared hosting servers and charge by the traffic. Does that exist? Thanks!
Unfortunately when it comes to a similar platform then you won't find a MS Stack version. Windows Azure comes close but this is more akin to Amazon's EC2.
The python stack in GAE is really easy to use and was able to make the transition quite quickly. Django is a MVC that is really popular and quite simple to use. It also gives you a ORM to write to BigTable which means you don't actually have to care about it.
The Java implementation is very similar and you can use really well know MVC frameworks for creating your app like Spring
I am also a .NET expert, but I have been using Python-AppEngine for hobby/entrepreneurial purposes specifically because it allows me to bootstrap an new web application at no initial cost. That is critical for me, as I have no budget at all for side projects, and so far, with many deployed AppEngine applications, I haven't spent a penny on it.
Learning a new language can seem like a drag at first, but I have come to find my new expertise in Python to be invaluable. Remember that the best and most employable developers are usually generalists with a broad and flexible palette of skills. My resume features C# and .NET as well as Python and Ruby/Ruby on Rails, and I have gotten very positive reaction from potential clients and employers.
Learning Python was dead easy. Getting a handle on WebOb and Django templates took more effort, but nothing extraordinary. Over time, I built up my own framework layer on top of those things that incorporates the best ideas from Rails and ASP.NET MVC that I missed. You can take a look at it on Google Code, and you will see a number of ideas that specifically borrowed from ASP.NET MVC.
I have only very basic experience with HTML/CSS and have quite a bit of experience with testing software and web apps from a consumer perspective. I'd love to launch a web application that plays nicely with Google services, similar to some of the apps you'd find on the Google Apps Marketplace, such as ManyMoon, time to note, Socialwok, etc. I'm a huge Google fan and would like to build something that's well integrated with other Google services.
If you were a total beginner and wanted to build a complex app like one of examples above (project management, CRM, etc), where would you start?
If you worked your ass off 18 hours a day, 24/7, how fast could you do it?
I've dabbled into various languages and development frameworks, and read about which apps are using what languages but it's hard to figure out what would be most beneficial to jump into. Ruby on Rails, PHP, Google Web Toolkit, AppEngine. The list goes on and on. I want to be able to build and launch my own scalable web app.
Thanks.
One bit of advice: There is no shortcut for proper experience. It took me 4 years to come to a point where I can build enterprise level web apps - even though I had the dream of building one immediately, right from the beginning. Start small and build your way up.
Even though I did hate this advice when I was receiving it... Don't try to build the next Facebook platform right now.
Now, to answer your question:
Skills:
You must be absolutely clear about server-client interaction with respect to HTTP. You will never understand AJAX fully without understanding HTTP and behind the scenes of browsers. Note: being clear and knowing everything are two different things. Be clear about HTTP.
Learn about HTML/CSS and JavaScript standards to some extent to know that they bahave differently in different browsers. In the grand scheme of things, they are not that important if you are okay with some framework that handles these for you (I recommend JQuery and JQuery UI).
Learn a little about Linux, Apache, PHP.
How to go about it:
To develop web-apps, you could start with the LAMP stack - Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP.
First build a small web app that does something trivial - like saving and retrieving user's stuff using AJAX and a nice UI or something. I'd recommend jQuery and jQueryUI for JavaScript and UI frameworks.
Then, build a small web app that just gets data from some Google service, given a user's credentials.. I am not Google expert but I guess Google provides APIs for some services(?).
Then build an app where two people can share their data coming from a Google's service or something to that effect.
Then add your own fancy stuff.
It goes on like that.
If you are a .Net person, you could go with.. Windows + IIS + MS SQL Server + ASP.Net3.5/VB/C#. Guess what? StackOverflow is build on that stack :)
Learning about and using an MVC framework is also a good idea - ASP.Net MVC or something similar for PHP.
Minor clarification - By Google-friendly did you mean SEO-friendly? If so, Google-friendly and web-app don't go well together.
It makes sense to build a Google-friendly website not a web-app.
I would start by
brainstorming a hands-on project
identify the skills you will need to achieve it
learn them as you work through the project
set progress goals and celebrate small victories
For most people 18 hrs/day 24/7 sounds a little overly optimistic. A reasonable goal would be to form an interesting project idea and research the needed skills the first week, work through a few tutorials and maybe apply your own functionality the second week, build something 'complete' the third week, then take a step back and take another look at your original goal.
As far as choosing a project, I find a notepad helps. I'll be somewhere and think, 'wouldn't it be nice if...' and I'll go look for a solution that provides that 'what if' and find it doesn't exist. So there you go.
I would also have a look to one of the top voted questions here on Stack Overflow:
What should a developer know before building a public web site.
My concern is that novice users will turn their back to a website which asks them to install Silverlight.
One of the reasons I think they might be scared of installing Silverlight is because they are not aware of what Silverlight actually is.
What's your take on this?
You can see the website riastats.com for information on install base, the main thing is if Silverlight gives an advantage such as the NBC Olympics coverage in United States uses Silverlight because of the Smooth Streaming technology plus the ablity to have a Live DVR where live streams can be "rewound" - all these features are probably better supported by Silverlight has the Client and Server ends can be well integrated (with Microsoft solutions).
I may be a little biased as I am a Silverlight developer, but with a less than 5MB download for runtime, that helps sell it more - especially as it may be a better alternative than the Flex download for Flash if this is required to create a solution that would have worked in Silverlight as it is a larger download.
Check out the silverlight.net showcase you'll see who and where it is being used - you can then make your decision based on this - rather than a few opinions (including mine!).
Well Silverlight is installed on about 50% of pc's now. So it depends on your market. Normal web users (ie. non-developers) tend to install anything you prompt them to if you can clearly and succinctly give them a compelling reason to run your application.
It doesn't tend to matter outside of the work place environments if you use silverlight or flash. What's more important is that your application will solve a problem the user has, and you can communicate that well.
They do not know what is is, marketshare is around 40%. I'd say it's not ready if you want to reach everyone.
However if Flash or javascript is not an option, give a firsttime visitor window informing your clients about silverlight.
I think you're going to have a lot of users on the public internet that don't have it installed. If you're really going for a mass-market site, and you aren't doing a crazy amount of media-rich type content, I would go with something like JQuery to make your Javascript easy and cross-platform.
First I'd like to make it clear, I'm not looking for a "my tech is better than yours" type of post; this is a real case scenario and I have been faced with this decision. With this in mind, let me explain:
We have a WinForms application. It started in the early .NET 1.0 but the first shipping version was using .NET 1.1. There are layers (like BusinessLayer.dll, Datalayer.dll, Framework.DLL, etc.) but at some point during the "long" development cycle of this application, the "presentation" layer (Win Forms) got infected with some code, thus the "separation between the code and the presentation with code behind" is some sort of myth.
Bad practices or whatever, the truth is that the application is there and it works.
Years passed and we had .NET 2.0, we slowly migrated and it mostly worked, had to change a few calls here and there. Last version did the same thing, but for .NET 3.5sp1. We needed some sort of Webservices thing, and decided to use WCF instead. It works fine.
But despite all these .NET upgrades, most of the application's codebase is still the same old rock and roll from 5 years ago. We use Gentle.NET (old and unmaintained now) for our dataobjects (it was a blessing 5 years ago!).
Our presentation layer, the winforms, are "nice looking" since we employ 90% of completely gdi+ custom controls. (whenever possible without having to hack the WinAPi). The application is touch based (i.e.: it makes use of the Ink but it doesn't rely on that), but the buttons, labels, etc, everything is "designed" to be used with a tactile device. (TabletPC or Touchscreen). Of course some users use keyboard/mouse.
With all that in mind, and with all this web2.0 and Internet fuzz (plus Jeff's posts ;) ), we are considering the possibility of rewriting the application but using a web technology.
The idea is obviously bringing more availability for our customers (they can use the system whenever/wherever they want), and less maintenance (we can upgrade and it is an instant upgrade for 'em all), etc. You know, the usual Internet vs WinApp thingy.
The problem is that given that this is the healthcare industry, not all of our customers might be willing to "move" their databases to our server/s, which is acceptable, and would force us to install a webserver/database server in their own servers so they have their own copy. Not a big problem (except we would have to update those manually but that's not an issue, given that we've been updating win32 apps for 5 years now!).
Now, back to the main "question".
The team has little Asp.NET experience, we did program a lot in ASP 2.0 (in 1999/2000) but that was a spaghetti of HTML+VBScript+CSS, so I don't think it counts. After all that experience (the Internet bubble!) we went back to VB6 then C#.NET 1x and you know the rest of the story. We're a small team of C# developers for WinForms. We've acquired some Linq To SQL Experience in our last .NET 3.5 ride, and we liked it. We felt it very natural and very "if we would have had this five years ago…" like.
Given all this, rewriting the application is not a "simple task" (not even if we wanted to do it in the already known C#.NET), it would take time and planning, but we could correct dozens of mistakes and with 5 years of experience working with the application, we now can say that we have a better idea of how the customers would like to use the software and what limitations we created (by ourselves) when we designed the current app.
All that "knowledge" of the application and the way the business works, could be applied to produce a much better application in terms of design and code and usability. Remember in .NET 1.1 we didn't even have generics! ;) (you'll see lots of ArrayList's hanging around here).
As an additional note, we use Crystal Reports (and, as usual, we hate it). We don't think the ink control is a "must" either. The HTML/CSS could be shaped to look the way we want it, although we're aware that HTML is not WinForms (and hence some things cannot be reproduced).
Do you think that planning this in MVC (or WebForms) would be too crazy?
I like the MVC (ruby on rails like) idea (I've never programmed in ruby beyond the basics of the book), so no one in our team is an expert, but we can always learn and read. It mustn't be "rocket science", must it?
I know that this whole question might be a little bit subjective, but would you replace an aging Winforms application with a new ASP/MVC/XXX web application? Do you have experience or have tried (and had success or failed) ?
Any insight in helping use better decide what to do will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: Thanks to all who responded, we'll evaluate whether this is a good move or not, it sure is a hell of work, but I am afraid the the desktop app is getting older (using old net 1.1 hacks) and tho it has been more or less working without problems in Vista and W7, I'm afraid a future update may break it.
Also, lots of "more or less core" parts of the application are exposing some badly designed ideas and we had to hack here and there to accomplish certain tasks. Part inexperience, part lack of 100% knowledge of how the business worked (and Customers not sure what they wanted).
A new application (in any form) would allow us to create a better foundation while retaining all the user knowledge.
But, it's a L O T of work :) So we'll consider all these options here.
As some of you have mentioned, maybe a thinner client and some (ab)use of WCF here and there might be more appropriate.
Once again, thanks to all!
It would be best to ditch all your efforts of reusing the desktop application code when you recreate the web app. Following are the reasons:
Web apps especially asp.net use a different model. For starters note http is stateless. Each time the browser talks to server you have to explicitly send the current content of all the controls on the current page. You would not have used such a model in your Windows application.
To decrease load on the network you want to optimize the size of viewstate and how frequent you make http requests. Again your existing window app does not have any such provisions.
Updating view. You might have different event handlers, threads and what not in your windows application to update the GUI in different scenarios. All of that will need to be replaced. Javascript is a totally different animal.
Security. When using a browser your access to the local disk is highly limited whereas you will take the same for granted in windows application. If there is any code in the windows app that requires local resources, then that is going to be a trouble spot for you.
I would recommend the following:
Verify if your current application has any local disk access requirements (e.g. read/write to local file etc).
As you write the different http modules or handlers, you can try leveraging some of the backend/ business logic part of the existing windows application.
Give some thought to what part of your application can become a web service.
It sounds like the application needs a lot of refactoring to clean it up. If you want to move to a web model, and have maximum reuse you will really need to do that. Before you move to a web model I think you need to understand if it will be possible to replicate your user interface in that model. Is it your unique selling point from a customer perspective? You want decisions like this to be user driven rather than purely technical decisions.
It sounds like your application is the perfect candidate for a thick client application, rather than the lowest common denominator web model.
Some things to consider:
How will the web interface impact the Tablet interaction?
What new customers will having a web version bring you?
Will existing customers abandon your product?
Do you have access to consultants or outside resource with the right skills to mentor you in web technology? If you don't you can rely on StackOverflow or other web resources to help. You need some good mentoring and guidance on the ground with you.
What happens if you start this effort and it takes much longer than you expect? You know the app but don't sound like you know the web. Past experience shows that massive rewrites like this can end in disaster (it never sounds so difficult at the start)
Can you possibly write new features in a web-based version?
Could you move to ClickOnce deployment to make the application easier to deploy to customers. One of the benefits of the web is easier (zero) deployment. Can you get closer to that?
Would it be easier to migrate to WPF and create a browser application with that?
Silverlight or Flex might be better options for creating a rich experience, and may be more approachable for WinForms developers. Is this a possibility?
It seems like your app. is one of those that works best as a desktop app. Though you want your users to be able to access your app. using a browser.
I would suggest refactoring as much as possible so that the GUI gets cleaner and don't have "code".
When you've done this, start developing a asp.net mvc app but keep your desktop app. You should be able to use all layers except the UI layer, making it easier/faster/... Now that mvc exists, I'd say webforms is more about letting non-web devs do web. But you know web, sort of, and you want control so mvc is the way to go.