I have been tasked to develop an application for my school that should be usable by smartphones.
Now, I have never done any smartphone programming so there is a lot of research to be done regarding well, everything.
So, my question here is, if I have to develop an application with no specific smartphone in mind, what would the most generic kind then be?
Second, I am looking for some reading material where I can get an understanding of the common aspects of the various smartphones so that I can pick the tools to work with, that are generic across smartphones. Any suggestions?
For the lowest barrier to entry for this project, consider using HTML/JavaScript and running it (at first) as a web page. Then, if you decide this is the path you want to take, use PhoneGap (or similar) to create native apps from your existing work.
May not be at the exact 'generic' level you are looking for, but the 'Mono' project may be worth a look.
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page
Its a commercial project allowing developers to create production code in C#/.Net, and use the Mono framework to deploy to cross platforms such as Macs, iphones, andriods etc..
I would agree with the above that HTML/CSS coded for the respective browsers using mobile resolutions would be the easiest way to go - but should you really wish to have a native application instead of a web-app, then Mono could be useful to you.
Related
I have an existing web application developed in ASP.Net F/W 3.5 and a mobile version of the same needs to be created.
I would like to have some suggestions on:
Where should I start? Are there some links & sites that would give me more clarity on how to approach this requirement?
Are there any ASP.Net/IIS features or Visual Studio options that might ease this mobile version creation?
As there are RadControls & AJAX used throughout the application, what should I be careful about?
Will it require every form in the UI to be replaced and take the same time as the old UI creation?
What should I be considering from the performance/optimization point of view?
From a technical standpoint, needing to do a separate mobile version is pretty moot. At least in the developed world, modern smartphone browsers and mobile networks are good enough that they can handle most things one can throw at them. They are obviously a bit more sensitive to bloated scripts and images, but you should be optimizing that stuff anyhow.
The reason to handle mobile separately is use case -- people using mobile sites are after different things than folks using the full-boned versions. Mobile usage tends to be hurried and pointed at solving a very specific problem -- where is the bathroom? How much is this laptop on amazon? When does the show start? Whereas desktop users tend to be a bit more relaxed. Then layer on top a multi-touch style interface and you are looking at a whole different beast. To the point one almost thinks of doing mobile clients for your services not mobile websites per se.
I read about some mobile devices support improvements in the recent version of the telerik ajax controls (see more here). On top of that they had some additional enhancements in mind for the Q1 2011 release - I suppose that they will perform pretty decently on a mobile version of your web app, provided that they are not native mobile components though :)
just simplify your design, you can download samples from http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/5d9cd41a-7438-495a-9a46-7470e7ec8576/Nokia_Mobile_Web_Templates.html
Although asp.net has mobile web controls but they haven;t been updated quite a while. Besides there is no need for that.
If you target modern devices like iPhone or Android or WM7 it should be ok. But you should be carefull about MS ajax controls. They load quite large script sizes.
It will require a new design.
For a good experience I try to make site(s) as simple as possible and finger/touch friendly.
Try to keep page/image/script sizes small
what does the relation between a Web frontend and a smartphone App with identical feature sets look like regarding the development effort? Are there any specific differences regarding the development effort between Apps of different smartphone platforms (iOS, symbian OS, Android, etc.) ignoring training time? A general estimation would completely satisfy me. ;)
Thanks in advance,
Flinsch.
I hesitate to call this an estimate, or even an informed guess, but perhaps by putting down some ideas I might help your thinking.
Ignoring any particular platform specifics I see the fundamental difference of Web v Native is that in the Web case you have some extra work to do:
a). You have presentation separated from the backend, with probably HTTP in between. So there are services to write and issues concerned with notifications and/or polling to deal with.
b). You're likely using a browser to do the presentation so you will be using some JavaScript kind of library, and these are still hard to drive.
So, if you are targeting a single device my guess is that writing native code is likely to be 50% quicker than web-based code - assuming that you really are targetting identical function.
What seems to happend is that we compromise Web Apps, reducing functionality somewhat and hence the overhead is reduced.
Also there's another factor, the UI portions of the Web App are in principle portable, hence in fact the Web App development may be a reasonable investment even if it does take more effort.
I suspect that portability may well end up being a dominant consideration.
specific differences? There are plenty, but each with their own tradeoff:
UI: Web applications have CSS, (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) specifications that is supported by major browsers (although have have their issues). For Smartphone apps, each UI has to be designed and implemented according to the language the apps can be built on. You can effectively create apps like Winamp (having skins). For web applications, this is relatively a quick effort compared to writing UI's for each different smartphone OS models out there.
Language of use/Portability: In Web applications, an application sits in a server, so every request is sent to the server and response is returned from it. This allows that 1) Web applications can be written in any language of choice, as the end user never sees the server nor needs to configure it, 2) It allows the developer to write in a language that he/she is comfortable in. In smartphone apps, for the developer to run his apps to all the smartphone OS'es, he/she has to learn the programming language for the OS, and learn to port their code to work there (if porting is possible). That never exists in Web applications.
Hardware limitations: For smartapps, the developer must be aware of the cellphone capabilities and limitations. Facebook (e.g.) can essentially grow their memory, and add new servers and cluster their environment as the demand grows. You can't do that with smartphone apps. You will have to limit your implementation to run in a capability that your desired smartphone can accommodate.
There are more (feel free to add) but all these are part of the development effort that a software developer has to look at if they want to go a a field of choice.
Is there already a ubiquitous/general framework to target multiple smartphone OS, i.e. like a QT for Android/iPhone/Symbian? Or would be technically too hard to write such a framework?
Technically it would be pretty much impossible (at least very difficult).
The first problem is that the mentioned platforms don't share a common language, so you wouldn't be able to directly share source code. Second is that your abstraction layer would have to be so big that it would probably kill performance.
The closest thing that I'm aware of is something like OpenGL es (you can almost copy & paste OpenGL code across platforms).
A more realistic option is targeting the web layer with an HTML5 application.
Phonegap if it fits your needs. Packages a web app with limited access to device services as an installable.
I work in a company which is primarily concerned with desktop apps not served over the internet.
Part of my value is I have a web based background and proficiencies in ASP.NET, JavaScript, JQuery etc.
The issue I'm having is that compared to a traditional desktop application building a rich web based app is more time consuming. This is understandable in terms of the hoops that need to be jumped through for web development. This is a cause of frustration for those not familiar with the ways of the web.
However because people are used to the non web world where I work I need to utilise every possible tool and technique to be productive as possible while building web based applications.
As such I'm looking for what other people do to be as productive as possible while making web based applications. I'm primarily thinking of ASP.NET (not using MVC) but apart from that everything is open.
The best tools for web development, in my opinion, are:
.Net Reflector
Firebug
IE Developer Toolbar
IE Tester and MyDebugBar
Fiddler
You should also look into NHibernate as an option.
The best choice of tools tends to vary quite a bit from one developer to another. It's also very dependent on the details of the type of application you're building.
For me, Visual Studio Team Suite is indispensable. It has a rich set of visual designers and other features that have a big impact on my productivity. Deep integration with bug reporting and source control is another huge time saver (I use Team Foundation Server).
With web forms, you can of course often use drag-and-drop components, which improves productivity for some people (although not me). I can't say I'm a fan of most third-party components. They can be quirky, take a long time to learn well, and then still not do exactly what I want them to. It's also a skill that often isn't portable from one job to the next.
You can leverage jQuery to help simplify scripting -- although even with jQuery I find scripting to be one of the most time-consuming and error prone aspects of web development.
If it's suitable for your environment, you might explore Silverlight. That way, you can often have the best of both worlds, building desktop-like apps using desktop-like tools, but with web-based deployment (Expression Blend is an awesome tool). You can also use Silverlight as a replacement for JavaScript in many cases, with code that's compiled and type-safe.
Good tools on the data side are critical, such as SQL Server Profiler. Visual Studio Team Data (part of Team Suite) is invaluable for it's data generation, unit testing and deployment and management aspects.
Something very underrated by many web developers is building up an appropriate infrastructure: things like logging and performance counters, that can help you track down problems quickly when they occur. A solid configuration system is also important.
In case it helps, I put together a longer list of tools. I also write about something I call the "ultra-fast approach" in my book, which is about more than just building web sites that run fast; it's also about how to build them quickly and reliably: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET.
You should use third party tools.
Telerik RAD Controls and the AJAXToolkit are two such tools available to you. They make much of the 'fancy' stuff built in.
Then, and probably preferably, use JQuery.
With those three options, you can make a fancy web application in the quickest way possible.
Finally be sure your UI and business logic is properly segregated so you can reuse your business logic easier.
There are several ways to increase productivity while building web applications, and they're not too different from desktop programming.
Code re-use. As a shop that is primarily desktop-based, this may not be an immediate option. But as you build your code-base, you'll find that you can use some of the code over for new applications, and even begin building your own customized frameworks.
Development tool knowledge. If a lot of the tools are similar, then you may see immediate benefit from this. If not, it may take more time as the team gets used to new IDEs, etc.
Third-party tools. UI toolkits, backend frameworks. These exist in both worlds, and could be utilized to help jump start development, until items 1 and 2 can be worked in.
A few must-have tools on the client side (i.e. the browser)
FireBug - let's you debug your javascript, DOM, headers, etc
WebDeveloper - provides all sorts of information about the rendering of the page
Selenium - Web UI functional testing framework + tool
(all are firefox add-ons)
Here's some of the tools I use for IE and FireFox, http://www.learn-ajax.com/blog/2008/04/debugging-tools-for-web-applications_03.aspx . Chrome, Opera and Safari also have their own built in client-side web development tools as well.
Most important tools for ANY productive development
Dual large screen monitors
keyboard and mouse that works for YOU.
Comfortable high-backed chair that will save you taking 2 weeks off for physiotherapy down the road.
I'm working on a project that currently has zero users but we would like to scale up to potentially hundreds. Currently we are running on a MySQL database with AMFPHP interacting with Flex. We used Flex because of its robust graphic features (important to this project) and because the initial developer (not me) already knew ActionScript. We are currently using AIR but might switch to web-based Flash at some point.
My questions are:
Is Flex a good tool for a project like this?
What are the main limitations of Flex that we might encounter?
What are other development platforms we might want to consider?
Thanks.
- Dave
Short answer, Yes. There are already many prime-time Apps using Flex as their UI development platform. If you go to the Adobe site they showcase quite a few.
Speaking personally, I chose Flex for two reasons, first was that, although you probably can do much of what Flex does in HTML or with an appropriate toolkit, Flex is designed for attractive and compelling user experience and has available all of Flash. Plus the development environment and available widgets make it easy and fun to program. I don't want to spark a religious war about HTML vs. Flex, so I'll leave that there - it works for me and my application and customers.
Second, and more important, was that it balances the processing load more towards the client which means my server architecture can be optimised just for serving the content and persisting the data. Most of my business logic has migrated across to the client. Having spent many years in classical architectures I think this is a huge step forward, but I can already her a chorus of disagreement about that too.
My word of caution about Flex comes from needing to adopt the right architecture for your client code. It is pretty easy to create a huge and badly performing app with Flex if you get that wrong. Make everything event driven and apparently asynchronous and you should be OK ('apparently' because the Flash player is single threaded). And that is downside 1, the single threaded Flash player sometimes causes issues.
Downside 2 is perhaps more serious and that is locked down desktops in corporate environments. Quite often your target audience won't have administrative rights to their computer and will have either the wrong flash player or none at all. This is particularly true in public sector organisations and the military, so if you are heading there I would test carefully the presence of Flash amongst your users.
Other than that I heartily recommend Flex. It's also a great thing to have on your CV!
HTH
Flex has no inherent scalability problems, however if you have a graphic intensive application, proper serving of these resources might be a problem, but that has little to do with Flex.
The only note-worthy and likely platform you won't be able to run on is the iPhone (no flash) and some older non-flash mobile devices (although most support Flash-lite nowadays)
As for alternatives, if you are Graphics heavy, and don't mind the iPhone, then Flex is good if not best cross platform solution besides using pure HTML technologies, the trick here is HTML alone can do 99% of what Flex can do, but if your App requires the missing 1% then you're out of Luck, also Flex will reduce crossplatform and most browser compatibility issues. So it might make your work more productive.
Silverlight 2 is an alternative to consider. WPF if you're looking for something with offline support.
Yes, the scale and type of project
fits.
Immaturity of frameworks and libraries you might depend on. Immaturity of IDE's.
Silverlight, JavaFX.
Flex + AIR is probably as good a tool as Visual Basic was; it may be a better tool for having a much more flexible programming language and having free development tools, but keep the limitations in mind....
The main limitation I've seen from working with it is documentation. There seems to be not enough documentation, not good enough documentation, and not enough high-visibility work on it in the community. (This is coming from years in .NET; I've been constantly upset with how little MSDN says about methods but generally able to deal with it by finding the most useful blog posts.)
Other possible development platforms would depend very heavily on the specifics of the project. Web-based platforms bog down in deep, stateful interactions with data sets (even with nice AJAX libraries), whereas maintaining client-side installations of any thick client program (say, Flex + AIR) might be overkill if it's just a few CRUD forms.