Hybrid Apps : A New Prodigy






Hybrid Apps : The New Era



What are hybrid apps ?

Hybrid apps are the love children of web applications and java-based applications. Web applications are constructed using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP and other web fundamental languages. These are run and operated on browsers so they are globally available on the web. On the other hand, java-based applications as the name suggest require java to construct them. These applications are stand-alone apps and may or may not require internet to work. Hybrid apps are the apps which are built using web development languages and are stand-alone applications which work like any other java based applications. If you are confused right now or curious to learn building these apps then keep reading because i am gonna list the features and the tools required to build your own simple app in less than 10 minutes.

Features of Hybrid Apps


  • Easy Languages

    As i told in the previous section, these apps are build using web development languages which are simple to learn and execute than the programing languages. The basic languages which you need to learn are HTML, CSS(although its not a language) and JavaScript. And thourough knowledge of these languages is not mandatory as there can be found enormous number of solutions for any problem you encounter while designing the app.


  • Server Interaction

    Using javascript and AJAX, you can interact with the server to fetch data and display into the app like the real time messaging service. Yeah you heard right. Creating an Instant messaging application is no longer far from our reach (Its beyond the subject of this article so just forget it now). To do the same thing with java you would have to learn about url interface and so much about networking.


  • Easy event handling

    The best thing about hybrid apps is that you can handle the events so easily. Like scrolling, clicking etc. You can attach event handlers very neatly and with jquery its just the child's work to play with events.


  • Desirable UI

    With HTML and CSS, you can design your app very precisely. You can have any effect, transitions and animations you want. If you have ever designed a website then it won't be nothing new for you.


Believe me, just sharpen your web development skills and you can develop your apps for android, IOS, windows phone and other platforms.

Who produced this love-child ?

The tool which filled the gap between native apps and web apps is Apache Cordova. Its a very powerful engine which is sole responsible for this wonderful creation. There is another tool Adobe Phonegap but it also runs on cordova. With phonegap comes a GUI which you can find easy to operate but everyone prefers CLI. Setting up the environment is very tedious job because you'll need to download and install so much tools. But the steps to set up the environment are well documented on cordova's website for which i'll provide a link at the end of the article. What cordova does is it bridges the gap by converting the html code into the platform-wise API by its well written java libraries. So you don't have to think about the java and all that stuff.

Tools Required


  • GIT

    Its the most famous version control system so you can find it immediately by googling. If you are creating app on windows then download git for windows.


  • Node.js

    Node is the library written in javascript to create a server environment. Its not the server which we require, its the node package manager which we require which comes along with it. I will list all the links to download these tools and you can find articles on installing these too.


  • Cordova

    The most important tool: cordova. After installing node its a child's play to install cordova. Its installation procedure is provided in its documentation for which the link will be provided here.


  • Platform SDK

    Its the second most important tool. If you are creating the app for android then you would have to download android sdk. If you are gonna create the app for windows phone then you would have to download windows sdk. Installing the sdk might be some tricky and time consuming but if have good data connection then it won't take much longer.

Important Links

If you like our articles then subscribe to our newsletter to get latest hacks and a lot of information in you mail-box. We are under the obligation to not spam your mail box. Just enter your mail-address at the right top form. Also feel free to comment on the articles so that we can improve the content and answer your query if there is any.


Comments

Post a Comment

Comment on articles for more info.

Popular posts from this blog

Search box for blog or website

Image
T his is the most basic need for any blog.Every blogger would want for his visitors to make it easy to search his blog.Search box helps your visitors to navigate through your blog and also increase your traffic.It also keeps you updated with your indexed posts.If you don't know about indexing then not to worry at all because it is the place where you will find everything.Blogger is totally customisable and you can add search box in your blog at any place where you want.I am sure if you are writing a blog then you are familiar with blogger widgets and you have also found blogger search box widget.Now the question is : Why are you reading this post if you know about the search box widget.Well, the answer is very simple: Search box widget is not working and is not providing the search results.
Read more

Image Search Engine Using Python

Image
Images provide a lot more information than audio or text. Image processing is the prime field of research for robotics as well as search engines. In this article we will explore the concept of finding similarity between digital images using python. Then we will use our program to find top 10 search results inside a dataset of images for a given picture. It won't be as good as google's search engine because of the technique we will be using to find similarity between images. But what we are going to make will be pretty cool. So lets start. Setting up the Environment Our Algorithm How the code looks Lets build the GUI Additional Techniques Setting up the Environment The code we are going to write requires a few tools which we need to install first. I will try to be as precise as i can and if you get stuck into installing some tool then you can drop a comment below and i will help you sort out the problem. So here are the tools and the steps to install
Keep reading

Cordova viewport problem solved

Image
Include the viewport settings in Cordova If you are facing the auto zooming problem of cordova then go read on the full article. Cordova actually ignores the viewport meta tag which causes the pixel density problem. So we need to tell cordova that viewport tag is equally important as other tags. To do this, we need to add some code to a file which is specify in the article. Corodva messes with pixels If you are using the latest cordova version or creating the cordova app for latest android versions then you may have faced the zoom malfunctioning.I also faced it when creating an app. Many of you may have already searched the web and found the answer of changing the meta tag attributes to get it working. But adding target-densitydpi=medium-dpi does not solve the problem for latest android versions. It may work for gingerbread but not for kitkat and others. So the final solution which i found was one of the stackexchange answer but rarely found. So i am gonna two things here, i
Keep reading