I am web developer from a year.I have Used PHP,python with client side Js libraries like Jquery,motools, etc.
So if switching to Adobe air will be a good thing ?
If It is strong enough to make decent desktop apps (Eg: music/videos player)?
If apps can be made for Android or iphone OS ?
Can i use Jquery like libraries (i am very used to that syntax) ?
And at last if there will be sufficient work in future for Air developers ?
Sorry if asked already .
It's true you can't make an iPhone app directly from the Air SDK, but Air, Mobile Safari and Android are all built on the WebKit browser. That means that there are only a small handful of very major differences between the platforms, so if you write your code to minimize the differences and isolate the differences in separate classes, it's actually pretty easy to keep your code base almost identical across systems.
For example, in Air and Android, you have the option of accessing the local SQLite database through either synchronous or asynchronous methods, with or without transactions. If you aren't used to asynchronous programming, you'll probably want to go with the simpler, more linear synchronous route; and maybe transactions will seem overkill to you. But because Webkit on the iPhone does not support synchronous database calls and everything is done through transactions, you'll be really stuck when it comes to porting your app to the iPhone. But if you write your own Database class so it is asynchronous and transaction based, all you'll have to do is write an interface or bridge to make your class work on all three platforms.
Air has a small mountain of features that you should probably stay away from if you want to port your apps quickly across all platforms. For example, you are allowed to write files to the user's local file system. Stuff like that is simply not allowed on iPhone, so don't expect it to port.
To get your code working on the iPhone and into the App store, there are several webkit wrapper frameworks. The two I know best are PhoneGap and Titanium. Titanium has the added benefit of publishing directly to both Android and iPhone, though I've never actually tried it myself. I do have lots of experience with PhoneGap, and while it is still pretty buggy, it does make it pretty simple to get your apps into the store.
You can't make apps for the iPhone with Adobe Air.
You have to use Objective-C and the Apple API.
Adobe AIR does allow you to leverage web development skills such as Javascript, HTML and CSS to develop desktop applications. So your skills are transferable in that sense. You can also use Flash (and Actionscript) to develop AIR apps.
Adobe used to offer a way to create iPhone apps from Actionscript using a packager but Apple disallowed that.
There are impressive AIR apps out there, but arguably it hasn't gotten the traction Adobe might have hoped by now, a few years after release.
If I were you I would look at the task or job you need to do and learn the best technology to tackle that, rather than just adopting a platform. But if it's iPhone development, the the Apple way is the only way, and you'll need to learn Objective-C.
Related
I'm making a game with HTML/CSS/Javascript because it's the code I'm most comfortable with at the moment. I'm only really doing this as an exercise in game development and plan to learn C# later. But for now that's what I'm using, and I have a question about it.
Obviously when making a website, you want your website to be compatible with all web browsers equally. Right now, I'm using Chrome to test/debug my game, and I've decided to develop this game with Chrome in mind. But not everybody has Chrome, and not everyone would want to download it in order to play my game.
Is there a way to run an HTML/CSS/Javascript file in a Google Chrome "environment" without having the actual browser installed? Just it's code engine and none of the rest of the browser.
I've been reading about their V8 Javascript engine that they use in Chrome, and am wondering if that is part of the answer I'm looking for. What I'd like to do is include this "engine" in an installer with my game files and have it install like any other game.
Hopefully this makes sense. This may not be possible/exist, but if someone knows something I don't or an point me in the right direction, that'd be amazing. Thanks!
You could look into Node-webkit which essentially allows you to write desktop applications in html/css/js. When you distribute your game along with your node webkit executable, it is always run in the same environment. You can see some cool examples on their demos and examples page.
Usually a common path to convert web application to native desktop applications is to use a "thin" browser as app container and ship it.
A lot of current applications out there are using this trick (Spotify, Slack, etc...) and it works pretty well.
I've read of some people using the CocoonJS game engine framework and successfully ship it with this techniques.
To most famous wrappers, that I know are node-webkit or electron (AKA atom-shell).
Once you include your game in either one of those you can just "compile" it (it is not a real compile, but just to give you an idea) and ship it: with some tricks it is also possible to publish it in the Mac/Win app stores.
In case you want to focus on mobile instead, there are similar frameworks but I don't really know which are the most common.
Note: if you're using fancy WebGL or very advanced stuff these tools may have some issues sometimes.
So essentially you want to install the JS engine to use it with any browser? In this case, the answer is: nope. Browsers act different, they don't have a standard interface, nor have this "swapping" capability in mind.
In case you'd be asking for an embedded browser inside an app... well, isn't that worse than installing Chrome? You may embed webkit/V8, but it's a hard way and you'd know programming.
So simple answer is: you'd make it compatible for at least the evergreen browsers (Chrome / Firefox mainly). Or reduce your target to webkit based only browsers (or in your case V8, i.e. Chrome, Chromium and the forks).
If you want that your game is only for chrome, because you read V8 documentation, you can create it as an extension. There'sn't other way to install your JS, because browser interpret javascript, not compile it. And the docs you need is found at: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted
To preface this, all of my experience has been with developing Ruby on Rails web apps serving, essentially, text data - I don't have any experience yet with rich media.
I'm looking into developing a music notation app (for practice and because I'm dissatisfied with many of the current options), and am trying to determine whether or not to build a native app or a web app. Since all of my programming experience lies in web development, I would prefer to make this a web app if I can, because if I chose to go native I would need to find a decent cross-platform solution in addition to the usual pitfalls of developing natively.
I suspect that even with HTML5 I wouldn't have access to enough processing power to make a browser-based audio engine feasible. It would need to have the ability to play and sequence not a single large .wav file of a song, but many short .wav files concurrently and in sequence. There would be no need for recording - only playback.
But since I've never done this before I really don't know if this is possible. So, I wanted to pose this to more experienced HTML5 media developers:
For modern browsers (I'm not too concerned with support for older browsers), would such an audio engine be feasible? (As in, is the current landscape of JS libraries and the HTML5 audio API sufficient for building something like this?) Or would something like this be far too CPU / memory hungry in a browser?
Thanks!
In my experience Chrome and Firefox for desktop both work great with multiple, sequenced, .wav files embedded in audio tags. You can trigger them with JavaScript and it all seems to work great.
Unfortunately, Mobile Safari seemed to be unhappy with more than one audio tag playing at once, and Chrome for Android had similar limitations. This was a year ago, so things might be different now.
Since we were targeting iPads, we wound up using Phonegap to mix in some native sound libraries into our HTML & JavaScript app. One gotcha that tripped us up: if you want looping audio samples, stick to .wav files; .mp3 files have some silence at the start and end that's really tricky to get rid of.
I've been investigating Web Audio Api to build synths, and it's still very primitive and difficult to use. The infrastructure seems to have had a boost when Web Audio was introduced, but not much development since. Mobile audio on the web is rarely mentioned, too clunky, or unsupported.
At the same time, JS has become significantly faster with the V8 engine, JS loading can happen as needed, asynchronously, and non-blocking, which may solve many of the CPU/memory concerns you have. Look into NodeJS and various module loaders such as webpack, ES6, for more info.
I think there will be attention to web-based music apps because the web can support multiple users. That could be a good reason to keep pushing through these murky waters.. especially if you're talking concurrent connections.
See Molgav tracker. It works on desktop and mobile, it uses hundred of sampled instruments, it has UI adapted for small mobile touchscreens. See how examples sounds.
I was searching for how to use swf file in android and most of the answer suggested me to use webview and an simple html file.
Now i think We can easily put css and javascript files in asset folder and then we can use them in an html5 code.
Looking at the power of HTML5, This will make app development for a web designer very easy job !
I just want to know that is it good to use this approach to build a good user interface in android ? Are there any technical pros/cons behind it ? will i miss some features provided by android ?
There are a lot of frameworks that allow you to write native android applications using HTML/CSS/JavaScript only. Here some of them :
PhoneGap
Cordova
Titanium
I've never used any of them, so I can't say if it's good or bad idea to write android apps this way, but here you can find a good session about it HTML5 versus Android.
There are pros & cons of using cross platforms. As per my point of view you shouldn't go for loading of everything in WebView.
I still recommend you native app approach because of following points :
WebView is one of the UI control in Android SDK. So, it will have
limitation of memory size and working with CPU utilization. So, you
might face performance issues in some devices.
As you know in older era we were used to work with desktop apps and after that everything is shifted to web-application.
It was
possible only because our browser(s) gets more features for e.g. more
memory area, CPU access, threading, individual Processing (like
google chrome) etc...
in-short, web browsers gets more smart and get treated as separate application. Now a days web-application can have mostly similar
performance as desktop apps. So, everything is now shifted to
web-application development.
This era will come in to Mobile development in later stage. but currently we are in middle stage of Mobile development and Cross platform development. So until and unless Web-View control of any platform (iOS / Android) gets more powerful, we can not totally relay on that.
I Hope I explain it properly :)
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First, I'm not interested in doing this professionally. I am a web developer, a coworker of mine recently left for Spotify and said he will be working mostly in JavaScript for the Spotify Desktop app. He said it uses "Chrome frame" and everything inside is done like a web app (HTML/JS/CSS).
As a web developer who never built anything for Desktop, this is great news. If I can use the technologies I already know and implement them inside some sort of a "frame" and still be able to build a windows or better yet cross platform app.
I know I didn't mention anything about the database, but even a simple hello world desktop app with web technologies would be great to get going.
So how does one go about this? Exactly what do I need/need to know?
You may start with Titanium for desktop dev. Also you may have a look at Chromium Embedded Framework. It's basically a web browser control based on chromium.
It's written in C++ so you can do all the low level OS stuff you want(Growl, tray icons, local file access, com ports, etc) in your container app, and then all the application logic and gui in html/javascript. It allows you to intercept any http request to either serve local resources or perform some custom action. For example, a request to http://localapp.com/SetTrayIconState?state=active could be intercepted by the container and then call the C++ function to update the tray icon.
It also allows you to create functions that can be called directly from JavaScript.
It's very difficult to debug JavaScript directly in CEF. There's no support for anything like Firebug.
You may also try AppJS.com (Helps to build Desktop Applications. for Linux, Windows and Mac using HTML, CSS and JavaScript)
Also, as pointed out by #Clint, the team at brackets.io (Adobe) created an awesome shell using Chromium Embedded Framework that makes it much easier to get started. It is called the brackets shell: github.com/adobe/brackets-shell Find out more about it here: clintberry.com/2013/html5-desktop-apps-with-brackets-shell
NW.js
(Previously known as node-webkit)
I would suggest NW.js if you are familiar with Node or experienced with JavaScript.
NW.js is an app runtime based on Chromium and node.js.
Features
Apps written in modern HTML5, CSS3, JS and WebGL
Complete support for Node.js APIs and all its third party modules.
Good performance: Node and WebKit run in the same thread: Function calls are made straightforward; objects are in the same heap and can just reference each other
Easy to package and distribute apps
Available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
You can find the NW.js repo here, and a good introduction to NW.js here. If you fancy learning Node.js I would recommend this SO post with a lot of good links.
Awesomium makes it easy to use HTML UI in your C++ or .NET app
Update
My previous answer is now outdated. These days you would be crazy not to look into using Electron for this. Many popular desktop apps have been developed on top of it.
NOTE: AppJS is deprecated and not recommended anymore.
Take a look at NW.js instead.
It seems the solutions for HTML/JS/CSS desktop apps are in no short supply.
One solution I have just come across is TideSDK: http://www.tidesdk.org/, which seems very promising, looking at the documentation.
You can develop with Python, PHP or Ruby, and package it for Mac, Windows or Linux.
Sorry to burst your bubble but Spotify desktop client is just a Webkit-based browser. Of course it exposes specific additional functionality, but it's only able to run JS and render HTML/CSS because it has a JS engine as well as a Chromium rendering engine. This does not help you with coding a client-side web-app and deploying to multiple platforms.
What you're looking for is similar to Sencha Touch - a framework that allows for HTML5 apps to be natively deployed to iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. It basically acts as an intermediary between certain API calls and device-specific functionality available.
I have no experience with appcelerator, bit it appears to be doing exactly that - and get very favourable reviews online. You should give it a go (unless you wanted to go back to 1999 and roll with MS HTA ;)
I know for there's Fluid and Prism (there are others, that's the one I used to use) that let you load a website into what looks like a standalone app.
In Chrome, you can create desktop shortcuts for websites. (you do that from within Chrome, you can't/shouldn't package that with your app) Chrome Frame is different:
Google Chrome Frame is a plug-in designed for Internet Explorer based
on the open-source Chromium project; it brings Google Chrome's open
web technologies to Internet Explorer.
You'd need to have some sort of wrapper like that for your webapp, and then the rest is the web technologies you're used to. You can use HTML5 local storage to store data while the app is offline. I think you might even be able to work with SQLite.
I don't know how you would go about accessing OS specific features, though. What I described above has the same limitations as any "regular" website. Hopefully this gives you some sort of guidance on where to start.
You can build Javascript apps with Adobe AIR… http://www.adobe.com/products/air.html
CEF offers lot of flexibility and options for customisation. But if the intent is to develop quickly node-webkit is also a good option. Node-web kit also offers ability to call node modules directly from DOM.
If there aren't any native modules to integrate Node-Webkit can offer better mileage. With native modules C/C++ or even C# it is better with CEF.
Take a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
I think JavaScript is very close to have everything that RIAs can offer.
What's missing from or for JavaScript to make it a viable RIA development alternative?
At the moment the only thing you really can't do in javascript/html is sound and video. This is changing with the HTML5 standards which includes sound and video as first class html elements.
The other thing Flash has going for it is a (slightly) more level ground between browsers. All browsers implement things slightly differently but a flash page renders pretty much the same across all.
Eventually (even now maybe) you will be able to do everything flash can in the browsers, the only question will be if and when all browsers support what you need.
While chromeexperiments.com has many neat technology demos, and I especially like some of the games there, it's still very much far off compared to what's being done with Adobe Flash/Air and Microsoft Silverlight.
I'm a long time web developer and I experienced the pain with browser in the early days, where none of the browsers cared much about standards. Today, it's very different. Not only do we have a lot more browsers, there are small incompatabilities in all of them which in some cases can be problematic. Normally applies when you're doing a pixel-perfect design, which you shouldn't do anyway ;-)
One of Silverlight (and WPFs) promisses are separation of concerns when it comes to delegating work between the developers and designers. While the tooling is not yet optimal, it's improving in every release of Visual Studio and Expression Blend. Being able to actually see what you're doing in a designer is helpful for a designer.
I have traditionally been a pro-web, it's more compatible, works everywhere, standards based and just the decent way to do things. It's only when you have benefits towards alternatives you should pick them, but normally they should be additions to an existing implementation built on web, this applies particulary to information systems, line of business, etc.
You don't want to get tied down to a specific version of a runtime or viewer, that will get us back to the problems we have today with far too many web-systems only compatible with Internet Explorer 6.0. It's a nightmare in many organizations today, their IT-systems doesn't work with anything other than IE6 so they are stuck, without any means of upgrading expect when they can afford replacing the existing systems.
If you develop a solution today, will your users be able to use it 3 years from now? What about 5 years? 10 years? Will they require a special-purpose-PC-setup that sits in the corner, running an old version of the OS and RIA/Viewer runtime? Sort of like how the IT-systems of the police runs all around the globe.
One project I'm currently working on (hobby-project) I initially started out with a desktop application, using Windows Forms and SQL Server Compact Edition for local storage. Then I figured I wanted to be more available to users, so I changed my plans to be an ASP.NET MVC project. Later on, I realized that it was about time to get more experience with Silverlight, so I ended up doing the whole thing with Silverlight 4 and Windows Azure. I'm amazed how productive you can be with Silverlight, though there is a pretty steep learning curve for someone who's traditionally built Windows Forms and Web Forms solutions.
What is missing from the HTML+JS technologies? Tools & Frameworks! One of the most important things for any developers is familiarities between projects. There shouldn't be a difference in the tools and frameworks you use if you want to develop a 3D game, Line-Of-Business Application or an interactive web banner. Reduced development time is another critical point, today's AJAX frameworks is way better than what we had to write ourselves back when XmlHttp first arrived with IE, so we're slowly getting to some place where we can do really cool RIA-solutions with nothing but web-technologies. I think HTML 5 is the beginning of something good, though it's still pretty far off compared to what we have today with Flash and Silverlight.
There is an adage that "anything that can be done in javascript, will eventually be done in javascript". Certainly, lack of a good designer for this sort of interactive app is one problem. It's important to note that javascript is just a scripting language, where silverlight and flash are frameworks that each include their own programming language. In fact, Silverlight 1.0 used javascript as it's language. So the real question is whether HTML+javascript will get to a point that Silverlight and Flash are not needed. I could see that happening in the post-HTML-5 timeframe, but that will be a while.
I don't think we are close to knowing the answer to this yet.
Personally I could argue either side pretty equally.
Javascript:
Pro - Almost universal. Newer phones even support it.
Con - Can be hard to manage. Still varies from browser to browser to some extent.
RIA:
Pro - Typically richer tools/better management.
Con - Not as close to universal. Flash is very widely deployed and Silverlight is gaining ground. More control for developer (I'm thinking of games, etc.)
Bottom line: either approach can be made to work. Each has strengths. Each has weaknesses. I don't expect a clear winner for a long time, since both sides will have proponents who won't want to switch camps.
Yes, of course.
jQuery+HTML5 makes it easy. jQ has animations, AJAX, keyboard and other stuff. HTML5 has canvas, audio and video. What else you need?
I think that there needs to be greater uniformity of the performance of JS engines across browsers. The cool things on chrome experiments are made possible by the super-fast performance of V8, the JS engine in Chrome. These things are not so exciting in many other browsers.
The advantage that is held by Flash/Silverlight is that they are browser extensions that do their work closer to the actual computer and are thus less constrained by the characteristics of the browser.
JS applications will be limited until all browsers have performance approximately the same as Chrome's.
I'm currently writing my first real application in Flash (Flex, actually) but it's only because i needed to have complex imagery from PDF, and PDF2SWF works much better than PDF2SVG.
so, in this particular case, it wasn't about the platform capabilities (neither of them could handle PDF), but about an accessory tool (transforming PDF to a usable vector format)
The benefit of Silverlight is that, with Silverlight 4, the same code base can be used to create a web hosted application and a full trust desktop application*. This is of great benefit to designers of Enterprise applications where the user must be constrained (to a certain extent) in what they can do and how they interact with the application.
So what you might see is that consumer websites go down the Javascript route, while Enterprise applications stick with Silverlight and Flash.
* I don't know about Flash and Adobe Air, but I would suspect that Adobe are working on this too.