Hi,
I wanted to rename this project to Android/iPhone instead of Android only.
I tend to think that today FULL native client development on Android or iOS
is outdated.
There are now libraries like Appcelerator Titanium (
)
that allow to do cross platform development with "native UI" look and feel
in Javascript and with very nice web integration.
I've done a prototype with Appcelerator and calling REST/JSON apis from it
is a breeze and the result is a very nice native looking application.
The great advantage is to develope mostly once for both platforms.
Also the application is tightly connected to a good mobile skin. Indeed
given XWiki's web capabilities, you cannot have of an application developped
on top of XWiki working on a mobile without actually calling the application
itself in web mode (good example is a livetable). So you can't only interact
with the content engine of XWiki. Therefore a good native mobile XWiki
application is a front end with nice "mobile" oriented widgets for the home
page, the activity stream, the search and maybe others which then link to
the native XWiki pages embedded in a mobile skin.
Althouth native mobile application + mobile skin are connected they can
still be viewed as different projects as the mobile skin can be used on it's
own.
Ludovic
Le 20/03/11 18:00, Thomas Mortagne a écrit :
Hi Rauf,
Great you are interested in this project !
On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 17:32, Abdul Rauf<raufbutt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Thomas Mortagne
I am very excited to contribute in open source community through the
platform of Google Summer of Code 2011. I have visited the ideas page
of “XWiki” at
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/for
GSoC 2011. I am interested in working on “Google Android client” for
XWiki.
The reason being is my interest in smartphone development. I have
previously
worked in Windows Phone 7 and to some extent in Blackberry. I want to
experience development in other platforms such as Android. I've worked in
Java, CSS, HTML and Javascript.
I am writing to let you know my understanding of the project and would
like
your feedback on it. My understanding of the requirements is as follows:
- To develop a smartphone application for XWiki.
- The application should be able to navigate wiki spaces and pages.
- The application should allow offline editing of wiki space and pages
and synchronise results on connecting with the repository.
- The application should also allow users an option to launch a browser
window.
That is for the UI part yes.
The user need a way to view the result and there is a lot of ways
which are not requiring the same work:
- launch the browser to the page (which will be the minimum for this GSOC)
- integrate the browser into the application if you have more time
- something event more integrated in the application if you have lot
of time but i doubt it will be possible ;)
Plus any commons sense you are thinking of since you are probably more
eperianced than me in mobile development ;)
But there is also another side of the project which is to develop a
nice android library package that could be used by any other Android
app to comunicate with XWiki.
More than the featuires what is important is to have a good
architecture (maven build, follow Andoird good practices) that will
make what you did easy to improve and add other features later by
someone else. That's the better way to make XWiki have a good android
client in the long run.
I have some knowledge of XML-RPC client/server communication. However,
you
mentioned you are interested in using REST API for such communication.
Does
XWiki already have REST API or this API needs to be created as part of
this
project. Would you please refer me some material to study in this regard?
Yes there is already a very complete REST interface, a lot more
complete than the XML-RPC one which is why the project should be based
on it.
I look forward to your response.
Regards
Notes: I only did a bit of Android developement mostly to test it so I
will not be able to help much on very advanced Android stuff
Rauf
University of Gloucestershire
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