Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Mobile Theme?

Collapse
12: Re: Mobile Theme? (response to 1)
Posted by Antonio Pisano on
I made some experiments with JQuery Mobile and seems very effective, easy to use and relatively lesser in footprint than other libs as ExtJS. I like JQuery's agnosticism about style in development.

The results with JQuery are "a lot like mobile", meaning that you have real buttons, drop-down menu and stuff which seems quite native on every platform.

The drawbacks of using JQuery or other rich js libs is that you will somehow throw away all the HTML gui features in OpenAcs, which are very solid... the css approach is more prone to reuse in this sense.

With JQuery you end up creating javascript applications running on the browser, which speak with RESTful webservices written in OpenAcs. The platform would become a "mere" interface to data, which could be queried in many ways other than from the smart webpage.

Speaking about different templates for each device, one of the many alternatives could be to query the user agent to detect a particular browser, then use a different adp for it by esplicitly telling the tcl to compile against it instead of the generic one. Data logic would be only one, with many dresses.

Collapse
13: Re: Mobile Theme? (response to 12)
Posted by Dave Bauer on
Jquery Mobile or similar platform based on HTML5 is probably the best way to go. Pretty much anything is going to require serious work to get something that is a "App" instead of just a mobile-friendly web application since you not only need to redesign the interface, but to get the best user experience you'll need to redesign how a user interacts with the application.

This means you need to write code to handle this. Each application is going to be different, so it is best to customize this to your specific application.

I have been experimenting with Jquery Mobile for specific forms and interfaces that are required to be used on a mobile phone and it really does give you some good user experience with little effort on the front end. OpenACS provides a great resource for the back end development.

If you go this way you might need Json-procs.tcl from CVS HEAD.

http://cvs.openacs.org/browse/OpenACS/openacs-4/packages/acs-tcl/tcl/json-procs.tcl