I have to develop a phone application on every platform so I thought of using phonegap. Seems pretty nice.
I have a web application coded in classic Asp and it's this webApplication that I need to strip down to be a phone app.
At first I thought it will be simple, my classic Asp render some html so phonegap is able to put it as an app.
But it's not that simple, because in my asp I have some code that is rendered server side, I've talked to some who tell me that some html could call the asp pages and this html could be used in phonegap. Don't think it's possible ...
Well if someone could help me here, maybe i've said something wrong in my little text don't hesitate to correct me :)
My solution (I think) : code some webServices in asp.net that will use the same database as my asp classic web application. And some html and jquery will call the webservices and those html and jquery will go trough phoneGap
What is the best way to transfer and asp classic web app to a multiplatform phone app ?
EDIT : After looking everywhere, effectively phonegap can't use asp pages. So I'm questionning myself should I do a mobile website or a mobile app with webservices?
EDIT 2: I'm going for an asp.net mobile website, someone have a great way to do this, I've seen the answer proposing mvc... more details?
You are on the correct path in wanting to use PhoneGap to create a multi-platform phone app via HTML5, and some mobile framework like jQuery Mobile.
Yes, you can leverage the power of ASP.NET to serve up your data but I wouldn't create an asmx web service. A SOAP-based service serving up XML may be too fat/overkill for your mobile web app. Instead, you may want to investigate using JSON which is more lightweight (remember, bandwidth is a concern with mobile apps). One can rapidly create an API to serve up your JSON data via the new ASP.NET Web API. With your API exposed, you can make an ajax call from your html page to retrieve the JSON and bind it using jQuery.
The bonus to using the ASP.NET Web API would be when it's time to upgrade that classic ASP web site you have there, you could leverage the API you already created.
I'd really consider rewriting the website using Mvc.Net. You may want to consider using the iUI for the views.
It will be much cheaper long-term to use modern technology than trying to shoe-horn legacy code into new usage areas.
It looks like you've made up your mind to go with a webapp instead of native apps via PhoneGap. I would recommend that you pick up this book by Jonathan Stark. It's very short - shorter than it should be when it gets into using PhoneGap - and although it focuses on iPhone development, much of the content is applicable to most mobile devices. The first few chapters give a great introduction on developing attractive, responsive, highly usable web apps for mobile devices. If you familiarize yourself with jQuery and jQTouch you can get some really great looking apps with relatively little effort, regardless of the server side technology you go with.
So i'm questionning myself should I do a mobile website or a mobile app with webservices ?
The answer to that question is always mobile website... given an outdated website that the client is wanting duplicate functionality in an app.
Do the work to convert the website or at least the portions that you need to use ajax and webservices. Once you have that in place pulling the same data to place in a mobile app will be easy... you've already done it once.
So my approach would be to convert this dataview into two separate elements Data and View.
You can probably even keep the current asp pages without a lot of modification to the code since you can still call these web-service functions the same way as before in your asp code.
Well, if you really want to reuse your existing webpage you can do the following.
Create a index.html and the body.onload event, redirect to your webpage.
Then build this index.html with phonegapbuild, and you will get your "native" application that simply loads your existing webpage.
If you want to serve mobile users, you have 2 main options:
Create a mobile website. You can render html on the server all you want, no javascript programming needed. Maybe look into jQuery mobile, it can be a cheap and easy way to make the website better for mobile users.
Create a html web app (and package it inside PhoneGap if you want). This is basically a html page which loads just the data from the server in json format and updates the page contents dynamically with javascript. You need good js skills to implement this, you're server is just a REST api that server json - technology can be anything, at least asp.net mvc makes it easy. On the client side you'll want to use some good structuring frameworks, backbone.js ( http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/ ) is a good option. Check out http://m.linkedin.com for an example of what a mobile web app can be.
3rd hidden option: just create a native app for each platform, that'll get you the best user experience.
Related
Im very new to programming and I'm wondering if someone can point me in the direction of how to make a website show 3 images that represent products and instead of redirecting me to another page but instead stay on the current page and show information about that product which can lead to a purchase.
I'd like to be able to build a SPA, but I'm in the early stages of learning HTML, Css and Javascript. What are the best framework to start using if i want to create a information website with just contact info, about me sections and so on.
The term what you are searching is Single-Page Applications (SPAs) which are Web apps that load a single HTML page and dynamically update that page as the user interacts with the app.
To have smooth scroll and other animation effects, you need to write JavaScript that can run be executed in the client side. I strongly recommend you to use a framework which is specifically designed to develop client side web applications such as Angular, Jquery. There are lot of options and I can't just specify all of them nor recommend specific one without knowing your actual requirements.
Do a basic research on Single-Page Applications, client side web applications in Internet, you will find lot of frameworks and tutorials.
The simplest way to use single page application nowadays is using frameworks like bootstrap. You could use their ready functionalities.
I have built an iphone app that writes data to firebase. That works fine. Now I want to display that data on a website. I am totally new to programming, and had to learn swift from scratch.
So my question is; is there a easy way to display the data on the webpage? It dont have to look good as long as the data is displayed. I'm not sure if I'm able to learn another codelanguage just yet ☺
To build a web site you'd use a combination of HTML (for the layout of the web site), CSS (for the actual look of the web site) and JavaScript (for the logic of the web site). JavaScript is indeed a different language, but a second language should be easier than your first one.
I recommend studying the Firebase Database documentation for JavaScript and taking the Firebase codelab for web. They are the best ways to get started with Firebase.
You may use the Firebase JS SDK
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/start
use Nodejs to generate static HTML
or
use Express as the website framework, dynamically generate the pages
Our little department has been working with WPF for a number of years now, there are only two of us, a designer and a programmer (me). We produce business applications for our company such as shipment tracking and the like.
We've recently began looking into a redesign of our company website and part of this has been a long running discussion on moving our desktop applications into web applications via the website, there are numerous reasons for this I wont go into.
Now the problem I'm having is actually wrapping my head around what HTML5 is and isn't I've spent long hours googling and finding mainly arguments for an against this and that, but i still lack a fundamental understanding of a few points, which I'm hoping to get cleared up.
1. Does HTML5 still need back-end code, such as PHP or ASP.NET?
This is a sticking point for me, our needs are pretty standard. We need to produce an application that can collect and display data from a database, it will need to do some data manipulation but nothing to heavy. Can HTML5 actually do this standalone? or is it still pretty much just the UI front-end?
2. HTML5 Applications - are they actually applications?
This is one that seems to give us the most confusion, different sources say different things on this subject, is HTML5 able of producing an actual application? or is it still just a website with an "app like" UI, much like what is achieved currently with JavaScript.
I'll answer the first point. HTML5 is just a markup language, it has nothing to do with getting data from database. If you want to create a dynamic html website, then you need to have some server engine to exchange data with UI. With ASP.NET server engine you can go different directions.
Have just pure HTML pages inside ASP.NET project (e.g. MVC, WebForms), and use services (like Web API/ServiceStack) to provide data. Typically you would use jQuery to get/post data to server and back.
Use ASP.NET MVC to create a html5 compliant page and exchange data with the server using controllers.
Use ASP.NET WebForms type of project. Here you would create aspx pages, which would contain only html markup (no server controls). In order to pass data from server to the view, you can use hidden fields here.
I am working on an web application/site and I want to do it with AngularJS, ASP.NET and Typescript.
I read about the Single Page Application concept, but I still have some question about this whole concept:
Why should I prefer a SPA (Single Page Application) before multiple pages.
I also have some questions about integrating it with ASP.NET:
In ASP.NET it standard generate a nice bootstrap layout with about 3 pages at the top. So I think that it means that I need to combine all these pages to one page. But how can I get it to work together with the routing of ASP.NET. Because you will use the routing of AngularJS, and I want to keep the login from ASP.NET (Can you maybe give an example so I can see how it works).
If I got it correctly Typescript in this concept will replace the JSON webservice. Is this correct or do I got this all wrong?
If you could answer one of my questions I would be very thankful.
SPA's are a trend, they are mostly useful to move the load on your server to the clients. Only data requests will be made to the server, rendering is done on the client machine.
There are still other benefits, but I guess this is the most relevant.
As to your questions regarding integration into ASP.NET.
Building an SPA does not mean all has to fit in one page. Look at AngularJS, it will fetch views as separate requests (see templateUrl in routingprovider). That being said, you can use ASP.NET MVC and serve ASP.NET Views as Angular Templates. This allows for a neat separation of Model, View and Controller parts.
Typescript is Microsoft's JavaScript dialect. It will not replace JSON and you will probably want to use JSON to exchange data with your server. You could use XML, but that is a little bit oldfashioned (and way more bulky).
I have no experience with TypeScript so I would not consider doing that (coffee might be a better alternative), but there are also some quicks in JavaScript you need to be aware of. I would suggest to search Douglas Crockford and Javascript on Youtube. The guy has great talks that can make you a JavaScript pro.
After getting pretty far along with a jQTouch web application for our website, my boss and I decided we may as well just make a true iPhone app instead of struggling with sloppy flickering animations and login authentication issues. We currently have a fully functional web site with some SOAP web services, but we are looking at rewriting these in order to make it easier for the iPhone to call the web methods (for displaying search results, categories, and article) for our app. I have not started anything on the iPhone yet as I am not sure which direction I should be taking.
For a developer that is somewhat unfamiliar with Objective-C (I understand the basics and the syntax), what tools do you recommend to create an iPhone app that uses data from ASP.NET web methods? If everything I need is provided in the iPhone SDK, where do I start?
If you are looking to use the SOAP methods from your ASP.NET site, then use Sudzc (http://sudzc.com/).
It will generate a package with all the Objective-C source code and classes written for you, to talk to your SOAP web services. You can drop it in your iPhone project and you're good to go.
You can tweak the generated code. Huge time saver :)