GSoC Android proposal

[Ngewi Fet]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:53, Muslim Chochlov <muslim.chochlov at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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].
>
>
I do not have any previous experience with PhoneGap or any of the other
cross-platform frameworks like Titanium.
With Titanium, you will be targeting their JS framework which then
interpretes the code at runtime [0]. It however uses native UI elements. I
don't know how appealing this is for GnuCash to target proprietary
cross-platform framework.

PhoneGap seems to be just pure web app in a WebView wrapper, which is good.
After googling a bit, a few notes
- Data storage is not a problem  (5MB database size limit ok?)
- Intents pose a challenge. You could use plugins and WebIntents [1],but
performance of plugins is reportedly not good [2]
- From what I've read, general performance seems to still be an issue
(although improving)

So no, I am not enthusiastic about developing with PhoneGap or any other
framework
(although I must admit that I am partial to a native UI look than to
generic looking apps).



> @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.
>
> Cheers,
> Muslim
>

Done.

Cheers,
Ngewi

[0]
http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/12/titanium-guides-project-js-environment.html
[1]
https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-plugins/tree/master/Android/WebIntent
[2]
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/app-builder/phonegap-plugin-vs-a-native-solution-in-android/653