I have a website and am planning to develop a mobile version of it for the iphone, blackberry and android.
My website is a social network built on PHP Zend framework. Now all these mobile apps are going to be having the same functionality like the website.
I am little ignorant about this - but from a high level I understand that all these mobile apps should not have to write any backend logic. For every functionality - they will simply make a web service API call to interact with the backend.
So does that mean, for every functionality I need to create a web service method. Can the existing code be re used - I'm a little lost -
Can someone shed some light on this matter or point me in the right direction (like some articles)
Thanks
I think the best thing for this kind of application would be write a mobile website. This should not include more than some new views in your Zend framework application.
There are some tutorials out there how to start. Just use your favorite search engine.
Apple and Android have browsers which are very advanced. They actually show the site in total. The point is would your website look better in that interface? ( I bet it would be cumbersome). You would have to make a mobile site (as suggested by #Felix) and implement the required features in a simple interface.
If you want an installable application then you are looking at three applications(one for each platform). My suggestion would be to make the mobile site and look for an app maker kind of product which would install your regular mobile site as an application on these platforms.
HTH
This is a very open subject that's obviously going to divide opinion (as already demonstrated it seems! :))
My personal view on it it this, using Safari on my iPhone is a terrible clunky cumbersome experience and "mobile optimised" websites are not ideal and don't really take advantage of the features of the device you are developing for (i.e. multi-touch etc)
This is why I think mobile applications are more appropriate ways of encapsulating the content of the web and delivering in a format suitable for its platform. Take for example, the Facebook application for iPhone and Android. That's a perfect example of taking the core features of the website and contextualising it in a manner that's easy to use and designed from the ground up for the device it's made for.
In answer to your question then yes, I would approach the development with web services in mind and use these to feedback the relevant data you need to interface with your site
While I agree with djhworld that the native mobile applications are sometimes easier to use than mobile-optimized web apps, there is a pretty big gulf in implementation time and user base fragmentation. I think the best first step is to develop a mobile web application, and if you are getting use there, consider developing native apps using web services. You may also want to look at PhoneGap as a way to cross-compile a single mobile app:
http://phonegap.com/
Also, see my other post about mobile web application development.
If you want to maximize your investment in your mobile site, I would develop it in HTML5. Currently, only WebKit browsers support it (iPhone/iPod/iPad/Android/Blackberry[soon]), but within a year most devices in developed countries will support it.
If you need to detect mobile devices on the server side, I would recommend Tera-WURFL. It is a high-speed PHP & MySQL mobile device detection software package that is free and open source.
Related
I found myself in several discussions throughout the week regarding a web application under development and whether it should leverage an API that is being created.
Here's the situation. I have a PHP MVC web application with a MySQL DB as well as several mobile apps all being developed in house. For the mobile apps we're building a rest api. The big question is why should my PHP web application now use that rest api? I've always expected the use of an API to be for third party systems that need to interface with my database or for systems built on a different technology. The web app is certainly not a third party system and the services are in PHP. If the API is on a different server than the web app then I guess it could be considered a third party system... which has not been decided yet.
To me, it just seems strange to leverage the API for the web app especially since the APIs services are going to be limited to about 50% of the functions available in the web app leaving me to build the other 50% that would be unique to the web app. I also foresee a performance hit to the web app stepping through the service layer rather than just accessing the DB directly. On the other side I see more maintenance having a code base for my web app hitting the DB and similar functions built into the api for mobile apps.
Has anyone found themselves in a similar situation and can provide some technical pros and cons to why I should just use the API or can point me to a solid case study?
Pros:
What if one day you decide to move the backend app to another machine? With an API, your app code won't need to change.
What if one day you grow, and need to scale to 10000 backend apps instead of 1? With an API, your app code won't need to change.
What if one day you decide to swap out MySQL for Mongo? With an API, your app code won't need to change.
^ Enforced separation of concerns between data access layer (DB) and application
Cons:
More code up front when writing the app layer
More incremental work when you need to support a new app layer feature that your API doesn't support yet
To me, the pros clearly win.
Here's the situation. I'm working on a PHP-based web app for a company with a desire to setup an SMS share widget on their mobile site. The goal is to allow visitors to mass-share via SMS to their list of mobile contacts, in much the same way that Cloudsponge does this for e-mail contacts via the Google/Hotmail/Yahoo/Exchange APIs.
I was told repeatedly that this is impossible, but after a bit of research we've come across the possibility of accomplishing this via the Facebook deep integration built into newer smartphones and mobile devices.
SO, being completely inept, and coming into this with zero knowledge of how I might accomplish this... and having spent hours researching Google turning up very little / misleading information, I come to you. Where to look? What to do? Not looking for a blueprint here... just a hand (or two, or three :-) to point me in the right direction.
You can't access any system feature (GPS fine location, Contacts, Câmera) from a web app running in a mobile browser. Just for security reasons.
I have one .php web site and I want to put it in iPad application "web application".
I mean create UIWebView and load files in WebView, so my First question is, is it possible to create this webApp and can I run it on Xcode simulator?
What do I need for implementing this application (Apache, MySQL) inside ipad outside?
Basically I want to have all my .php class inside of app and run it via iPad app, it means that if I hadn't any internet I can run the application.
Since I want to run it in both iPad and XCode simulator.
Would you please give me some hints for implement this application?
A few points you need to think about:
App Store Approval - if you intend to market this app (i.e it's not for jailbroken devices via Cydia, or an in-house corporate app) then you will most likely run in to issues with the approval process.*
You're intending to bundle in a scripting language with your application. Now this may not be an issue depending on whether or not this is exposed to the end-user; but you do run the risk of Apple finding out and pulling the plug.
The alternative to bundling in a scripting language (PHP in your case) is going to be loading the code off of an external server. This is a no-no straight away, as Apple requires your application to have functionality offline - or atleast they did. Where this leaves all the Social Networking and other network-dependant apps... Well, I guess there are exceptions!
Device Performance - you're essentially intending to run a small web server on a mobile device; a tablet in this case. This could be very resource intensive, so is probably not wise. I personally wouldn't want my battery being drained because someone has decided that they want to bundle in a web server with their application.
Your implementation idea itself is sound, in the respect of using a UIWebView. You should probably check out the Apache Cordova/PhoneGap framework, and that should satisfy your needs and provide an off-the-shelf way of packaging up your web app. If you do need custom functionality then it's worth looking at anyway; plugins are relatively easy to develop, there's a wide range available already and the plans for cordova now are to allow developers to implement it into native applications. (Say, if only one view requires PhoneGap functionality etc)
Personally, I fail to see what requires PHP that can not be done via HTML5 and PhoneGap. There are storage options available, SQL options, you're using web technologies so can easily query external web services. It's also a lot safer with regards to app approval - as it's tried and tested; there are many applications build using such solutions already in the store.
I think you need a serious re-think. Otherwise, perhaps you could post some more details?
Please note that PHP is a server-side language. So do you want to run a server on your iPad? If so, you can develop PHP applications on a proper desktop/laptop and then view them on iPad Safari browser over Wifi.
Otherwise you can install LightHTTPd server with PHP libraries, MySQL, CURL and all from Cydia app store on a jailbroken iOS device to get a full environment. For Android there is this app PAW server available which can run an Apache server in such devices.
If you just want to check your website is working fine on small devices, or you want to check responsiveness of your website. Go to:Ipad Peek and run your website on given devices/simulators using url.
A simple google search pulled up this free framework: http://www.ipfaces.org/
I've never used to before, but it might do what you need.
We have a business system based on PHP/JQuery/HTML. What would be the best solution for creating a mobile version of the system. Im thinking of making a part of it run on different mobile platforms and came up with presenting web services for the data and jquery mobile for the presentation.
Anyone out there done something similar?
I am about to offer an iphone app for a travel agency. They probably use web services but if not what can I do? What is the easiest way to integrate an iPhone app that read and send data to a website without web service. Site is built with php (I dont know php am a java guy). What can I do for that? Client is a travel agency has a website for ordering hotels.
You can still use NSURLConnection to connect to the site and get its HTML. You just need to have a good parser that can deal with the website and use it like a person would with a browser.
If the site is not cooperating with you, it's not really a good idea. Either, it breaks their Terms of Service or they might just randomly change their site around and your app will break. Usually this isn't because they are trying to break your app -- they just don't know about it, and they are just trying to keep their site up to date.
If you are cooperating, you don't have to go as far as a SOAP webservice -- or even a complex API. They just need PHP that dumps out something easy to parse and that is guaranteed not to change.