What features (HTML, JS, CSS, Web APIs), outside of plugins, are available in a cordova web view ? I am making a web app, and then I use cordova to create an apk file. The web app works fine with chrome and firefox for android. But when I try the generated apk on the same android device and the emulator the JavaScript is obviously not executed because buttons have no effect.
The initial HTML and CSS display fine, and I think I use some JavaScript or HTML5 features that are not available yet on cordova web view, but I don't know what I can use and what I cannot. I had a look at the emulator's error log but I get nothing meaning-full.
For example is it possible to use es2015 without transpiling, esModules etc, but I don't know where to look it up. What is the difference between a webview browser and chrome/firefox for android.
Targeting Android 4 and later.
https://cordova.apache.org/
It's probably easiest to look at the architecture diagram: https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/latest/guide/overview/index.html.
Cordova apps consist of a small wrapper around a WebView (this is a "window" of the default browser installed by your mobile OS, although you can swap it out for another: https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/latest/guide/hybrid/webviews/), with access to the mobile device's features via plugins. So... to answer your questions:
You can use any technology that's supported by the mobile browser you're working in. https://caniuse.com is super helpful in this regard.
You will also find that Android 4.x's stock web browser is not that great -- some of the shiny new popover UI stuff (walkthrough help and light boxes) will render, but the z-order is all messed up when you try to click to the next item. I've run into other issues as well, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.
The Crosswalk project allows you to embed a Chrome browser web view in older Android versions (back to 4.x I think). Support for this project has been discontinued in the latest Cordova releases, as it's no longer necessary.
Related
Is there a reason why an HTML5 app that works fine in browser would work differently when compiled with Cordova for Android?
Does cordova not support all the same things as the browser?
Im mainly thinking of / referring to the way JavaScript works.
Cordova itself does not handle the presentation layer of an application. Cordova creates a basic, single view, native application wherein the single view is a webview. A webview is native to the platofrm/SDK that the application is implemented in.
Because webviews are packaged with the SDK, they are not updatable like the browser that is on the device. This means that code you create may run just fine in a browser on the device but may not run in the native webview. Additionally, your code may work on a newer version of the platform/SDK and not on older versions.
If you are experiencing an issue with a particular item being used in a webview, it is best to look up the capabilities of that particular webview from the platform/SDK version you are seeing issues with.
An example would be using the latest version of Cordova to build an Android application making use of canvas elements. If you deploy the application to a device running Android 5.0 you will have no issue, but if you deploy the same application on a device running Android 2.3.4 your application will appear to not function. This is not because of Cordova, it is because of the capabilities of the webviews in the various platform/SDK versions.
One way to try and safeguard against these types of issues is to make use of a framework. The reason being that most frontend frameworks have builtin fallbacks for compatibilities with various versions of webviews/browsers/etc.
Because Cordova uses the native browser view. Some JS implementation can differ from Chrome, Firefox, and so on.
That's mainly for security reason, or for webview itself (depending of the platform) you may have some limitations or differences.
I understand that not all the code and functionality are available. However, I am currently in the planing of a new project and there are no document to be found on this aspect.
I want to know once I code in Titanium, is it possible to make a web version for mobile without the application with limited feature and the same code base? (something like touch.facebook.com vs Facebook app)
Thank you very much
Of course, Titanium could do that since it also supports MobileWeb. Titanium features:
Develop native applications for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, and
mobile web through a single code base.
With their Titanium Studio, you can easily build and package your app for MobileWeb.
But there are a lot of things to consider on developing titanium apps. Here are the few things I've learned along the way:
Don't use ImageView. Use View with backgroundImage. If it's an icon, you can make a font for your app. See how to create an icon font using IcoMoon.
Memory management
Never use borderRadius, borderWidth, borderColor in components within components, as for example a ScrollableView.
Minimize calling Ti.Platform.[property_name]. Example: instead of always calling Ti.Platform.osname to your controllers, you could have put it on you commonjs var osname = Ti.Platform.osname, then exports.getPlatformName = function() { return osname; };
Here are some few references:
http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/152656/tips-and-tricks-for-memory-management
http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/116867/this-is-a-solution-to-your-memory-woes#answer-203729
http://www.tidev.io/category/howtos/
Titanium SDK supports iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Tizen and HTML5 platforms. You can read more about that in their documentation. You can limit features in HTML5 app in a code with simple if() and reuse most of your codebase.
You can create a web version of the application if you include Mobile Web in the target platforms, when you create the project.
To deploy it on the browser, run the application as Mobile Web.
You may refer the following links for more details.
Getting Started with Mobile Web
Mobile Web Platform Overview
Mobile Web Limitations
I've been building Android apps for a few years now, and I've arrived to this working setup:
Intellij Idea IDE write/debug
Genymotion "Emulator"
Physical Device (only when needed)
Git
Ant (probably should move to Gradle) Release/Debug builds
And now I'm looking to form an equally productive environment for Javascript (Phonegap, etc), for Android/iOS/Win8Phone.
I want to avoid the "nice-text-editor-only" solution (I believe a full IDE is superior in productivity terms).
Any suggestions?
Try Brackets editor http://brackets.io/. It's a nice editor to code the web. Phonegap plugins also available for this editor. Just take a look at this editor. Make sure to download the version of Brackets with Phonegap Plugin compatibility.
For the Cordova/Phonegap app I developed, I used cloud9. In my workflow, I would first get things working in my browser, then occasionally do builds with Adobe's Phonegap Build service to work out the kinks on my mobile devices.
The nice thing about c9 is you'll have a public URL for the website you're developing so you can preview it in your device's browser, which is typically closer to the environment you'll get with Phonegap.
The weinre debugging tool, although slow if you're running it through http://debug.phonegap.com/, can really help track down problems when debugging on mobile devices.
At first glimpse Cordova and PhoneGap exist primarily for the use to develop apps to be used on a mobile device. Well, I am not interessted in the developement of native mobile apps.
There exists a webapplication (a cms) of our own and the question is now if a mobile toolkit like Cordova or PhoneGap is able to be of any help to develop parts of our cms functionalities with it in order to be able to support more plattforms.
Does it make sense to use Cordova or PhoneGap for the developement of a pure browser-based web application?
Phonegap (or Cordova as its now called) works by wrapping your webpages in a Webview and giving you access (in JavaScript) to some of the native device functions, such as the Camera, Accelerometer, Contacts etc.
As for whether it will help you depends on if want to make use of any of the native device functions, for example if you think incorporating the Camera (current HTML support for camera is quite spotty) into your web app is of use then you probably should consider it.
Another consideration is how your users will access the applications, with Phonegap it gets packages into a native app and they can just launch it from their home-screen (or however they launch apps on their mobile device), while with a Web App it depends on the device, on iOS you can pin it to your home screen and add some meta tags to make it appear more native like (for example hide the address bar) while on Android as far as I know you can't do that.
Finally consider that with Phonegap it might be more of a pain to debug your application since your HTML/Js is wrapped in a Webview, but as far as I've seen there is no easy way to debug it there.
One other thing I seem to recall reading somewhere that on iOS Apple doesn't give your native applications' Webviews access to the same amount of memory as if it were in safari so the exact sane web application when packaged into a Phonegap application might actually be slower.
To sum up, the benefits of wrapping your application in a Phonegap wrapper are access to native device functions and how your users access your app, if those aren't important (or the cons outweigh the benefits) than it probably isn't worth your while to go that route.
Cordova/Phonegap extend javascript with functionality provided by mobile operating systems. Therefore apps developed with these frameworks must be compiled to the target platform and only embed the HTML etc. in an embedded browser. The extensions need java, objective-c etc. code to run so I don't think that you are able to benefit from this code.
You are forced to write your own mobile device compliant HTML code when using Cordova/Phonegap. There are no neat mobile device ready user interface controls provided by the framework but only access to device specific hardware or software apis like notification etc. is given.
Cordova is just the latest name of PhoneGap. I would not go for that if you just want to build a mobile website. First of all publishing such an app on several online stores (iTunes, Play) is a pain.
I am thinking of building an application, kind of like TiddlyWiki in the sense that everything is self-contained in an HTML file, or at least in a bundle where a user won't have to install anything. It works on just about any browser, and on mobile phones (Android and iPhone), and in some browsers (e.g. Firefox), manages to save to the local filesystem without a plugin (albeit, it launches many security warnings, but there are other solutions for that). Other browsers happen to use a Java plugin to bypass this restriction.
Are there any technologies that exist that make this possible? HTML5's web storage sounds like it would be almost perfect, except that the data would be tied to the browser.
Any assistance would be appreciated (even if that just means editting / retagging the question to get more folks looking).
Whats about the fileapi: http://caniuse.com/#search=fileapi
I am just adding a relevant comment with this but not exactly an answer...
When you are saying that you want to develop application which contains everything... Then I would like to add about Titanium, PhoneGap, and others (Corona)...
This softwares provides JavaScript base which will be running on all the mobiles (if mobile applications), desktops (if desktop applications) and so on.... But Titanium (as i am working on it) works on the SDK of all the other languages for development...
Now TiddlyWiki, what i have understood from the link is that it is creating a web application or something like that which will work on all the other mobile devices. But this is NOT Good always, Since some application needs to be a NATIVE environment (which is supported by Titanium). Native applications will be much more faster than any other developed applications..