As a long time time Flex developer I've thought about building my next application - which should run on the iPad as well - with OpenLaszlo. OpenLaszlo offer a Flash and DHTML runtime, but besides the demos on the website I don't see any real world application built with OpenLaszlo:
http://openlaszlo.org/showcase
Has anyone built a large application with the DHTML runtime, and what was your experience doing that.
Thanks!
I've tested our complicated video editing application under HTML5 mode of OpenLaszlo (formerly known as DHTML mode) and everything works aside from the text mis-aligning a bit. Audio and Video playback is not available in the latest official release (4.9.0) but the latest nightly builds ( http://download.openlaszlo.org/nightly/trunk/ ) contain the html5video and html5audio classes which work fine for media types that play in the new HTML5 and tags (different browsers support different ones). My test results of what works can be viewed here:
http://jira.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-10058
In regards to iPad, everything seemed to work fine except that it was not possible to programmatically play more than 1 video/audio item at a time without user interaction. However, this seems to be a limitation of iPad and not OpenLaszlo since a test HTML5 application suffered the same limitation.
http://www.pandora.com and http://www.gliffy.com are large applications built on OpenLaszlo Framework.
The DHTML runtime (or the ability to generate an HTML5 application, as we'd probably phrase that feature today) has been added to OpenLaszlo with 4.0 release in March 2007. The first time I saw a version of Laszlo Webtop running using the DHTML runtime was in mid 2009, although Laszlo Calendar wasn't working at that moment. In March 2011 I witnessed a much improved version of Webtop running in DHTML mode, the system looked very stable.
In July 2012 Gliffy announced the Gliffy HTML5 Editor Preview. Gliffy is an online diagram editor, which has been around for a number of years - but in the past it was only running as a Flash application. Gliffy is a very complex application with a large code base, and it's a good sign that Gliffy is able to run on the DHTML runtime. I haven't found any information on the Gliffy website to which browsers are supported by the HTML5 preview.
Based on this information I would say that the DHTML runtime is production ready. The only question is if Laszlo or Critical Path (the company which acquired Laszlo) is going to keep funding the project in the future, since the number of developers working on the platform at the moment is very low.
Laszlo has not upgraded the HTML5/DHTML runtime to support the newer version of IE (IE9+), although it seems that the company is working on improving the DHTML support for IE at the moment (as of summer 2012). If you are planning to use the DHTML runtime for only some browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), everything should work relatively well.
If you plant to develop an OpenLaszlo application using the DHTML runtime, I'd recommend that you use the Trunk version (upcoming 5.0 release) of OpenLaszlo, since a lot of bugs have been fixed in Trunk for DHTML.Despite the fact that it hasn't been released, a number of developers are using that version already for production purposes.
Related
I was reviewing the NOV for Mac OS X development, in my way I found that they have Nevron Writer for Mac, which is built using their SDK (did any one find the Visio-like application for Mac?), and it seems there is a huge problem in performance and rendering. They mentioned that they are supporting native look and feel, but Writer UI rendering is for sure not native. Is it achieving portability by sacrificing native rendering?
Full Disclosure: I work for Nevron
The Nevron Draw product is about to be released in the next couple of weeks, but is currently not available for download although the version is already built. We are now updating the Nevron Office site (www.nevronoffice.com) and it will soon contain information and downloads for Nevron Draw.
Regarding performance and rendering. What machine are you running the program on? NOV UI for Mac is very fast and in many aspects I would even say faster than native Mac UI controls.
Regarding native look and feel. We do not use native controls in NOV – the look and feel is made to resemble Mac via CSS. We are going to release a new and updated Mac theme very soon. There are many reasons for which we do not use native controls, including:
Portability - native controls are not portable and we support a large set of integration platforms. Achieving 100% single code base for Windows, Mac and other platforms is impossible with AWT like toolkits that use native controls.
Common denominator problem – the more platforms that you support means that toolkits that use native controls will suffer features, as all controls are very different on each platform. NOV UI is on the other hand very feature rich and we provide identical functionality for all users on all platforms.
Has anyone made experiences with both Rhodes and PhoneGap?
I tried building the same "Hello World"-App with both Frameworks for Android, and tested them on a Samsung Galaxy S device running Android 2.3.3.
In both cases, i used HTML5 & jQuery Mobile (in the same version) to design the UI.
The app does nothing but offering a link on the "Home"-Page which uses a slide transition to a second page. The Rhodes app needs longer to startup, but has a very smooth animation when transitioning to the second page. The PhoneGap app flickers and jerks.
Did anyone of you experience a similar behavior? And could you resolve the issues in the PhoneGap version? Could the difference lie in different browser engines / WebViews used by Rhodes / PhoneGap?
I can't give you a good answer, as I'm fairly new to Rhodes and Phonegap myself. What I do know is that RhoMobile uses Motorola's own build of WebKit if you have RhoElements enabled or have added motorola_browser as a capability.
If your Rhodes app was using Motorola's Webkit, I suppose it's possible that the custom Webkit build has been optimized for rendering the content generated by Rhodes, with its EMML and all. This is just speculation, of course.
Phonegap, however, relies on the system's browser and what it offers in terms of performance. AFAIK, it's basically a UIWebView object on iOS.
A really neat bonus of using Motorola's Webkit is you'll have only one browser to work against, across all platforms. (At least in theory, I haven't yet tested how consistent the render engine actually is across platforms.)
To sum up, Rhodes/RhoMobile sounds awesome on paper. I'm just hoping it will live up to my expectetions. Your "Hello world" test could be just a fluke with Phonegap, or it could mean that Motorola's Webkit is indeed performing better. Guess I'll find out sooner or later.
I would like to create a Windows desktop app using HTML5 features, specifically H.264 video,Web SQL Database,FileReader API. I don't want to use AIR (which currently does not support the video tag, instead uses Flash). Ideally I would like an exe file that just wraps the latest version of webkit in a basic window. It should be stand alone, not rely on the user having Chrome etc. installed. It could load an index.html file in the same directory as the exe. That is it.
I have been unable to find anything like this. I was going to build it myself using QTWebkit but the latest version (4.8.0) does not support the Video tag due to some kind of build issue. I assume the 4.8.1 version will fix this.
Does anyone out there know of something like this that is available now?
For anyone coming across this, Titanium for desktop is no longer supported by Appcelerator, but the project is still supported as an open source initiative. As of today (10/14/2012), it is called TideSDK. According to their Twitter account, they're behind in the 1.3 release due to some sponsored work that will end up in the code base.
Additional options not yet mentioned include AppJS (OSS, requires node.js) and Sencha Desktop Packager (quite pricey).
I think titanium is not totally gone. There is this stuff called tideSdk
I couldn't try it out yet also , so video support and the codec are open for your exploration. Here is how they say:
Create multi-platform desktop apps with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript
TideSDK is the new standard for creating beautiful and unique desktop
apps using your web development skills.
I recently thought about doing the same thing, you can still do it with air without using flash, but you could also use Chrome Packaged apps, mozilla prism (although inactive today) or Microsoft HTA (html application).
You can think of using a framework that does the browser embedding for you like Titanium. It's mostly used for creating apps that can be published to iphone, android, and windows devices. It will create a windows MSI install.
Another option is to use the CEF project ( Chromium Embedded Framework for C/C++). I havn't looked at it much, so I can't tell you how difficult/easy it is to work with. Their main site also has wrappers for Java, .NET, and other languages.
I'm now learning Ruby because I saw it's a very powerfull language, but now I want to know what mobile ports of Ruby we have and for what devices.
PS: I have a HTC S711, HP iPAQ Hx2, Nokia E61, Nokia N95, Palm T|X, Palm Z22, HP Jornada 720..., it's better if I can use it on these platforms, but I'm open to buy other devices, as I'm a mobile addict.
There's a couple of possibilities:
JRuby can run pretty much anywhere where there is a JVM, which means pretty much anywhere except iPhone. (Apparently, there's even JVM implementations for Windows Mobile.) Note that you need a special stripped-down version for JME-CDC (Java Platform Micro Edition - Connected Device Configuration), which hasn't been updated in a while. However, if you ask nicely, someone will probably at least help you build your own (it basically involves deleting stuff from the main version, recompile, test, delete more, recompile, test, ...).
JRuby can also run on Android. In fact, there's three versions available: JRuby is part of the Android Scripting Environment (ASE), and then there's JRuby lead developer Charles Oliver "Headius" Nutter's Ruboto. The very latest addition is JRuby for Android by Pascal Chatterjee.
MRI was once ported both to Symbian S60 (Nokia) and Windows CE, although I have no idea how hard that is to get working, how current these ports are, whether they are integrated into the official sourcetree or are maintained seperately (if at all) nor if it also applies to YARV. There is a Symbian subdirectory in the YARV sourcecode which was last updated just 5 days ago, and a Windows CE subdirectory in the MRI sourcecode which was updated 6 months ago, though.
Apparently, MRI also runs on the iPhone.
YARV was recently ported to Android.
It looks pretty likely that MacRuby will, in the future, run on the iPhone. The MacRuby developers all either work for Apple or have signed NDAs and are therefore not allowed to say anything, but when one of the lead developers was asked what the new Ahead-of-Time compiler in MacRuby 0.5 would be useful for, he oracled something like "running Ruby on resource-constrained ARM-powered pocket-sized mobile internet devices with security restrictions regarding interpreted code" or something similarly cryptic.
The same applies to IronRuby: since IronRuby runs on Silverlight and Silverlight is Microsoft's new phone platform (or everything-platform, really), I wouldn't be surprised to see IronRuby on at least the new Windows Phone 7. [EDIT: Actually, it already does, IronRuby on Windows Mobile 7 was demonstrated at MIX10.]
In the meantime, the Rhodes mobile framework by Rhomobile allows you to develop cross-platform (iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian (Nokia) and Android) native mobile applications using HTML as the UI. The way it basically works, is that you write your UI in HTML which gets displayed by the native browser control that is built into the phone, and the Rhodes framework then supplies the necessary CSS and JavaScript to make it look and feel "native". However, it's not a web application: the webserver that serves the HTML also runs on the phone, as does the Ruby interpreter in which you run your models and controllers. (See this answer I gave to another question for more details.) Even if you don't want to use their framework, you can still steal their different Ruby interpreters for the different platforms. E.g., they actually use XRuby, not JRuby for their Blackberry port and YARV via the Android Native Development Kit for their Android port.
I have tried Ruby on Symbian about a year back, it was easy to get going but was a bit limited in how it integrated into the phone. I see the project have progressed a lot since then. I will definitely try it out again.
Coming soon: MobiRuby is an upcoming (Summer 2012) project using the mruby interpreter. It's iOS specific, but I wouldn't be surprised to see mruby use elsewhere in the coming months.
How mature is AJAX support for mobile phones?
Are there mobile versions of some famous AJAX frameworks?
I would live even with a limited support for some ajax lib.
iPhones won't cache anything larger than 25 KB uncompressed, which means libraries like jQuery and Prototype won't be cached like they would be on a normal computer. I suspect this sort of thing is the case with lots of other mobile browsers, too.
XUI is a slimmed down jQuery-like library that's fairly popular.
Mobile phone market is very fragmented and you need to restrict yourself to a specific technology to get a useful answer. As far as I know there is no cross platform mobile framework available. However some mobile browsers are quite advanced and they will be able to handle jQuery or other libraries. I have seen jQuery run on S60 built in browser as well as Opera (not mini) at the same platform. I have also successfully run jQuery in mobile IE (Windows Mobile Professional Edition). However I wouldn't say it is safe to use jQuery on these platforms. You also want to ask the question regarding the size of the downloaded library as well as the execution speed.
I think mobile ajax is not mature yet, but you should read this wmlprogramming thread, and check this preliminar version of dojo mobile too.
You can also look at iWebkit or iUI to build iPhone friendly web apps
Peter-Paul Koch (ppk) started working on mobile device compatibility tests and has made compatibility charts for mobile devices.
Once these are documented, libraries authors can begin to abstract the differences. I don't know of many libraries that are cross-platform yet, but Peter's work should speed development.