PhoneGap in Lianja v2.0

[barrymavin]

If you have been following the development roadmap at http://www.lianja.com/resources/roadmap you will know that in Lianja v2.0 we are focussing a lot on mobile app development.

The two main features in v2.0 for mobile app developers are:

1. PhoneGap Live App View

and

2. PhoneGap cloud build

I've had several people ask me about PhoneGap building of Apps. Here are some of the questions:

Question 1: If I build a Lianja mobile App and use the PhoneGap build cloud service can I still use WebView sections and populate them dynamically by referencing a .rsp or .jssp page on a remote Lianja Cloud Server.

Answer: Yes. A WebView is a standard built-in section that can be generated dynamically.

Question 2: Can that WebView section contain my own UI components that I build out of third party components?

Answer: Yes of course. When a WebView is loaded it also has access to the Lianja system object globally within the browser tab or the mobile App instance. This lets you manipulate other parts of the UI in your App.

Question 3: If I use PhoneGap do I have any access to the camera?

Answer: Yes, that's the whole point of PhoneGap. It provides a layer of abstraction above the device platform (iOS or Android) so that you can build cross platform Apps.

Question 4: What is the advantage of using Lianja for building a PhoneGap App rather than hand coding it all myself.

Answer: Lianja is a platform. It provides a client side framework and server side data connectivity as well as the ability to generate dynamic content on the server that is injected into the client app at runtime. All CRUD operations are handled automatically for you as well as image/photo uploads and document editing. And let's not forget the UI navigation which is all embedded within the mobile app. In summary, Lianja is a complete platform for building business Apps.

[hmischel@diligentsystems.com]

Hi Barry,

I love being able to test my phone app directly on my phone - thank you!

I have an app where the client wants three buttons as the menu. It's a very unsophisticated user base -to say the least.

I cant use a canvas section since they may be using a different size devices, so I need something responsive.

I decided to try and do this with a custom javascript section and not an rsp page. The click functions work on the phone, but the text for the buttons are not showing up.

Are the custom javascripts sections not yet fully supported on web/mobile?

Thanks.

Herb

[barrymavin]

Hi Herb,

Yes they are fully supported, both canvas and custom.

Due to the responsive nature of CSS and the fonts used on mobile devices you may need to increase the size of the buttons if you want to implement it that way. To get all this to work across all types of devices I do some scaling.

You may want to just use a footer menu and prefix the captions with a + e.g.

+Add,View,Delete

That will layout the buttons across any device size and you can just use the footer menu delegate to do whatever you want.