Hi Tomasz,
I cannot promise, but I'll try to find the time to implement some proof of
concept for zim+phonegap.
(The problem is that this is not that low effort, because all potential
platforms either don't have
tested zimlib support or don't have phonegap plugin support out-of-the-box.)
For the proof-of-concept I expect that I don't need support by phonegap, but
mid-term it would make sense
if you could connect me with them (e.g. regarding plugin support for
symbian/meego)).
Also please keep me updated about the state of the Wikipedia app for phonegap.
(I assume there is nothing available right now?) .
Best regards,
Christian
Am 29.08.2011 12:08, schrieb Tomasz Finc:
Agreed. I'd LOVE to see openZIM support in a Wikipedia app. We need to
make sure that our users can still access content even if their
disconnected. I personally would love to be able to download a couple
of collections in the openZim format and redistribute as needed. It
would be really cool to download them trivially on a phone and then
redistribute them to areas that may not have a faster internet
connection but have a decent wifi connection.
Christian, Patrick and I can easily connect you with the PhoneGap team
to help you out with this plug in. It would be good to get an early
proof of concept out for the openZim and wikitech developers to play
with. What do you say? Are you up for it?
--tomasz
On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 7:06 PM, Patrick Reilly<[email protected]> wrote:
That would be a really nice addition to the official application in the future.
We should definitely continue to talk about this and try to figure out
the optimal approach.
Also, once the PhoneGap based Android application is developed it
should be easy to fork and experiment with the various approaches
described below.
— Patrick
On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Christian Pühringer<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
It would be really nice if offline (=zim) support was integrated in the
official wikipedia app: The user could switch between online access and
offline reading.
If I understand Tomasz correctly, it is planned to implement the wikipedia app
with phonegap,
so having zim support for phonegap would allow integration of offline support
into the app.
Therefore I think its a good idea to implement zim support for phone gap.
Regarding the technical details there a basically to ways to implement zim
support in phonegap:
- Using phonegap API. Theoretically device independent, but questionable
whether actually working
with sufficient performance on all target platforms.
- As plugin: Implemented as a native component, with bindings to phonegap.
I'd prefer the plugin approach. The additional effort of implementing the zimlib
plugin
for different platforms is not that high. The zimlib (and liblzma) is already
available for
C++ (STL): Symbian[1], Meego[2],
Android (with NDK, cleaner is to use Java),
iPhone (untested, may have some issues (see [5]),
alternative would be to port to objective-C)
and probably Bada
Java (less mature than C++ implementation) : Android, Blackberry and other
J2ME [3] (not sure whether possible on J2ME, but this is even more true for
phonegap API approach)
Porting needs only to be done to:
C#: Windows Mobile
Other: ?
In addition the plugins for the platforms need to be written but this shouldn't
be a too high effort.
The zimlib is already pretty stable, so the maintenance effort for the ports
should not be too bad.
An additional benefit of the plugin-approach is that the ported zimlibs plugins
can also be used for native apps.
(Besides having the plain zimlib, the plugin projects can be used as a starting
point for new projects).
For the phonegap API approach zimlib must be ported to java script. As
mentioned before I doubt that the javascript zimlib would work with sufficient
performance on all (if any) .
devices. See for example [4]
Best regards,
Christian
[1] Neither File (required for phonegap API approach) nor plugins officially
supported in phonegap. However, should be pretty easy to add.
(Either in official (=WRT) phonegap, or in QT port. Probably
better in QT port).
[2] Not supported by phonegap. However, should be possible to use QT phonegap
port.
[3] Not supported by phonegap.
[4]
http://community.phonegap.com/nitobi/topics/how_to_implement_lzma?from_gsfn=true
[5]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/823116/how-do-i-use-c-stl-containers-in-my-iphone-app
Am 27.08.2011 10:34, schrieb Manuel Schneider:
Hi,
is this maybe also useful for ZIM - to make ZIM readers which are
working cross-platform?
As far as I understood phonegap is mainly a framework to create mobile
apps based on HTML 5. At least the display of ZIM contents should be
simple then as we just need a HTML widget for that.
But what about libraries needed to read file contents, such as zimlib? I
couldn't find out if Phonegap itself supports native file access (so we
could re-implement ZIM features with that) or if it allows the use of
native libraries.
/Manuel
Am 27.08.2011 02:44, schrieb Tomasz Finc:
Thanks for the super detailed write up Brion. I've been actively
talking with the PhoneGap guys after doing some more research on this
and it seems like a really good fit to have a consistent experience
across a whole host of devices.
What were looking at is not necessarily a lot of depth in every single
platform but a lot of horizontal range. Phonegap platform support
beats out Titanium pretty easily there.
We'll be working a lot closer with the PhoneGap team going forward to
quickly have something in the android store to start.
If anyone is interested in helping then we'll have plenty of
opportunities to join in. Over the next weeks we'll be adding bugs and
sending out more calls to get involved.
--tomasz
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Brion Vibber<[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Tomasz Finc<[email protected]> wrote:
I've been asking around on IRC but thought it would be good to open up
to a larger audience.
Has anyone here used PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/) for mobile
app development? I'm eager to get your thoughts and potentially
brainstorm some new ideas.
I haven't used PhoneGap except for some brief testing, but I have used
Titanium Appcelerator, which is another framework in that space, in working
on StatusNet's iPhone& Android app.
Between the two I'd recommend PhoneGap for our usage as preferable over
Titanium, but would appreciate more feedback from people who've done fuller
PhoneGap work.
A few key differences:
PhoneGap models around extending a full-screen web view with additional
JavaScript-accessible APIs to use device& OS capabilities (camera, address
book, notifications, etc). This gives you few/no "native widgets" for your
primary screens, but can make it relatively easy to create an HTML/JS-based
web application that's extended with native abilities and can be shipped
into native app stores.
Titanium was originally based on a similar model, but switched to a native
widget bridging system, where your JavaScript code instantiates and
manipulates objects which are bridged to native UI components and such. This
can make your widgets look& feel more native, and can make some UI bits
faster. But it also makes behavior less consistent between platforms; many
widgets or features simply aren't available on all platforms, and last I
checked there was basically *no* working support other than iOS and Android.
(An early BlackBerry demo came out, was insufficient to do anything we
needed, and never got updated that we saw.)
Since the Wikipedia app is mostly a webview and ...... maybe a menu?
PhoneGap is probably a good choice. Titanium can also embed a webview, but
it's a lot more work to deal with two levels of JS! PhoneGap has much
broader device support, but be warned -- it'll use the native webview on
each system, so JS and HTML/CSS support will still vary across platforms.
Debugging in PhoneGap basically devolves to being able to debug a web
application; various tools likehttp://phonegap.github.com/weinre/ can help
with this (or if you code carefully you may get away debugging your app in
your favorite desktop browser directly ;)
Titanium was always a bear to debug things in and basically came down to
'watch the system log output in Android, that's the only place you'll
actually see low-level errors'; this may be better now with their IDE
support.
Titanium also pretty aggressively pushes their support& training services
which I find offputting; their project build tool wants you to login to
their 'cloud' stuff to let you hook up to their remote build& analytics
services, which we didn't ever really use.
Support seemed to center on getting people to take training webinars or
pointing people at the documentation and examples when they ask how to do
something; I didn't find them very responsive about platform bugs or missing
documentation except by contacting their couple of Android developers
one-on-one in IRC to ask for merges -- which was usually a pretty good
experience! Getting fixes for iOS merged was very difficult; I could never
get ahold of their iOS developers directly, and they didn't seem to be any
more responsive to low-level bugs we filed through their customer support
system.
We had to build with a patched version of the iOS and Android runtimes for
quite some time as there were serious bugs. On the plus side, maintaining a
patched branch in git was very easy -- a lot of 'git pull origin master' and
occasionally tidying up conflicts. Their source is all on github and is easy
to fork and not too awful to build, at least for the mobile runtime.
Note that both PhoneGap and Titanium frameworks are open source& hosted on
github, though both require a CLA to submit code upstream. (I have signed
the Titanium CLA to submit patches to them last year; haven't done for
PhoneGap yet.)
-- brion
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