GSoC Android proposal

Muslim Chochlov muslim.chochlov at gmail.com
Tue Apr 10 04:53:35 EDT 2012


Hi,


> One possibility you might want to consider is the open source Apache
> Cordova
> (formerly PhoneGap) framework.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneGap See
> the supported platforms/devices here.
>
> 1. Single code base - multiple platforms/devices. However, a different
> build
> environment for each device.
> 2. The user interface is written in standards compliant
> HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript. Not in native Objective C or Java.
> 3. Can also support the tablets and other phones, if needed.
>
> We can limit the scope of this GSoC project to Android phones only. But
> gives us the option to support Symbian or other devices, in future.
>
>
Looks very attracting at a first glance. Write once, run everywhere is
definitely a very good approach.
However, it seems the more complex and platform specific application tends
to be the more sophisticated becomes development process. I am particularly
concerned about using intents. They are a crucial part of Android mobile
application, but using them with Phonegap is not a trivial task. You need
to write your own plugin that calls an intent and plugin writing is not
well documented.
If thinking about this project as a basis for multi platform GnuCash mobile
helper tool then it's definitely a good approach. But could it happen that
at some point it becomes more effort consuming than supporting few native
mobile applications.
BTW, there is an alternative called Appcelerator Titanium which is more
native platform friendly but supports only Android and iOS.

@Ngewi, how enthusiastic are you about developing with PhoneGap or maybe
you have any previous experience of using it?
You could investigate on this topic and check if PhoneGap bridges all the
functionality required by expense tracker application.
There should not be a problem with storage or ui, but could be with
intents. Here are a few links to get started [1] [2] [3].

@Ngewi, add github code link to your proposal in Melange. You should still
be able to edit it, if not just paste it into comments.

[1]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1482586/comparison-between-corona-phonegap-titanium
[2]
http://jonathanstark.com/blog/2010/04/05/phonegap-vs-titanium-mobile-et-al/
[3]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10043272/android-is-it-possible-to-fire-a-native-intent-from-an-application-wrapped-in

Cheers,
Muslim


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