Is it possible to use the JQuery effects in the existing Xcode project?
Please let me know if it is possible.
Short answer without more details is probably no, inasmuch as Objective-c is a compiled language that produces a runtime package that will run on the appropriate devices and JQuery is a set of javascript libraries that are interpreted when run in a browser or or on a server side javascript engine such as NodeJs.
It's possible you might be writing an application in Xcode that users a browser window so once you are inside a browser then the answer might be yes you can run JQuery inside that but this supposes that you are writing html/js inside this area.
THe other question would be why do you want to? If you are writing XCode then you have full access to all the Apple UI's which are native to the touch devices you are developing for and probably (certainly) give you a much wider set of options.
Related
I've started playing around with Appcelerator Hyperloop. While it seems great to access native APIs from JS from day zero, it does raise a few questions about architecture of the platform and the performance.
Currently (AFAIK) a Titanium app has a main UI thread (that runs the native UI controllers) and a JS thread (that runs the JS logic). Each call from JS to Native is passed though the "Bridge" (which is the expansive operation in an app).
Also, Titanium API doesn't cover all the native API and abstracts as much as it can. But if new APIs are introduced it could take time for Appcelerator to implement those into the platform.
One of my favorite things about Titanium is the ability to extend it (using objective-c for iOS and java for Android) - allowing to use native APIs that are not covered by Titanium, and also developing a really native performance controls in case we need to do anything that's too "heavy" for JS. And, as mentioned it's developed 100% native for each platform.
Now that Appcelerator introduced Hyperloop I've done a simple test app and saw that Hyperloop is not translated into native code but just to normal JS code:
var UILabel = require('hyperloop/uikit/uilabel');
var label = new UILabel();
label.text = "HELLO WORLD!";
$.index.add(label);
And another thing about it is that you have to run on the main thread.
So we basically have a few things come to mind here as far as Hyperloop architecture goes:
We still have a bridge? if Hyperloop is JS that calls "special" Hyperloop require then we still have a bridge, that now not only acts as a bridge but also needs to do some sort of reflection (which is also an expansive operation)?
Until now JS ran in it's own thread - so now running in a single main thread seems to be a potential source to more UI blocking operation.
The old-fashioned modules were truly native (not including the bridge call) - so how do Hyperloop-enabled apps compare with those?
There isn't much documentation or articles about Hyperloop that explain the inner working yet - so if anyone has any answers have been trying apps with it could be very helpful.
Answering your questions straight-forward:
There are no Kroll-Proxies involved anymore, since actual classes are being generated on runtime. This is done by using the hyperloop-metabase that does reflection (as you already said) to build an AST that grabs the actual signatures, types, classes, methods, properties, etc.
We did not see any performance-issues with running on the main-thread for now. If you do so, please file a JIRA-ticket so we can investigate the use-case.
The old-modules were "less native" then now, simply because they were all wrapped by the Kroll-proxy (by extending every view from TiUIView and every proxy from TiProxy / TiViewProxy. Hyperloop does not work with those, making the module-development much more faster by also allowing the developer to test his/her process live in their app without the need of packaging and referencing the module manually. Hyperloop modules are nothing else then CommonJS modules that are already used frequently across Alloy and other Ti-components.
I hope that gives you a quick overview on how Hyperloop works. If you have further questions, let us know!
Hans
(As a detailed answer to the above comment)
So let's say you have a tableview in iOS. The native class is UITableView and the Titanium-API is Ti.UI.TableView / Ti.UI.ListView.
While the ListView already provides a huge performance-boost compared to the TableView by abstracting the Child-API usage to templates, those child-API's (Ti.UI.Label, Ti.UI.ImageView, ...) are still custom classes that are wrapped and provide custom logic (!) e.g. keeping track of it's parent-references, internal data-structures and locks to jump between the threads.
If you now check the Hyperloop example of a native UITableView, you access the native API's directly, so no proxy behind it needs to manage sections, templates, items etc. Of course we deliver that API through a kroll proxy in order to display it in Titanium, but you don't "jump between the bridge" with every call you make from the SDK.
The easiest way to see that is to actually run some bigger example like the tableview, collectionview and view-animation. If you do a fast scroll through these, you already feel the performance boost compared to "classic" Titanium API's, simply because the only communication between your proxy and (like a Ti.UI.Window you want to add it to) is the .add() to receive the native API of the type HyperloopClass.
Finally, of course it still makes sense to use Ti.UI.ListView for example, because it comes with the builtin utilities that Titanium devs love (events, easy configuration and layout-handling). But thats also where the benefit of Hyperloop comes along, by allowing the developer to access those API's him-/herself.
I hope that helps a bit more to understand it.
I have a desktop app based on HTML/JS that needs WebKit to function at a reasonable speed. Normally, I would live with IE behaving badly, but its JS engine is just too slow.
I would normally go to Appcelerator for this, but it seems they have discontinued their desktop SDK and left it for the "community"...
This needs to function on Windows PCs, or I would just use Fluid (http://fluidapp.com)...
Is there a simple Webkit wrapper that I can use, or should I build one really quick in something like Qt. I haven't used Qt in a while, so I'd have to look at it again and make sure WebKit is implemented in it...
While it is somewhat node.js-oriented, AppJS may offer what you're looking for. If it doesn't already support other scripting languages, it might at least provide a good example to start from.
Update: in the time that's passed since my original answer, it seems node-webkit fills a similar role but has gathered and maintained more momentum than AppJS. It's a little more focused, in that it doesn't attempt to provide much additional "framework" on top of simply exposing the node.js API to the window's JS context.
There's also https://github.com/atom/atom-shell, which I just learned of and may be similar.
One other thing to note is that (presumably with either, but at least with node-webkit), you MUST be cautious of any XSS-like vulnerability in your app that an attacker could exploit to gain complete access to the user's native machine. So if you are simply needing to package an offline web app in a downloadable desktop distribution, you may wish to research more PhoneGap-like solutions (e.g. Mac OS X as PhoneGap platform) or a plain web view wrapper (like mentioned in the OP) that do not expose an entire OS-level native API — as node.js does — into the JavaScript environment.
Is there any sort of Mac app, Web app, or others like JSFiddle for Objective-C/Cocoa purposes?
It's not entirely the same, but look into F-Script: http://www.fscript.org/
It lets you rapid-prototype and experiment. You can also hook it into existing apps very easily. It has been invaluable for me for certain types of UI debugging.
I've also found CodeRunner to be quite handy for boilerplate app generation and one-click console running to try language snippets out. Available on the AppStore at a price.
I created playgrounds for Objective-C on top of code injection, so you can experiment with normal iOS simulator, it's open source on GitHub
Video showing them in action
Is it possible to integrate a webkit engine in a java application.
Here is my thinking, I would like to implement my User Interface using javascript and business logic in Java and want to communicate back and forth between the js and java. I have looked at titanium and chromiumembedded. But i dont get the complete picture. Can anyone give me a good explanation of webkit being used in a standalone application.
There are a few solutions, the main one being for SWT. See here for the SWT solution. There was a similar question here referring to SWING.
Edit: Oh my, I can't believe I forgot Lobo, a browser written in Java. More Specifically, their Browser API providers support for embedding. This seems to be the better solution for cross-platform and possibly stability. I'm not 100% sure on the first two solutions' development. Hope that provides some insight.
JavaFX 2 has an embedded browser component based on Webkit. There is a tutorial provided by Oracle here.
I have a .NET application, which I want to port to OSX. Up to now I used a DirectShow DLL for WebCam handling. Can I use an Objective-C DLL for Mono? How? I'm a newbie on Mac. Is there an existing (WebCam handling) solution for this? Is there a better solution?
You want to use the QTKit framework to do this, in particular you can use the QTCaptureView as a reusable NSView that you can embed in an existing window or in an application to do the actual video capturing.
I have just added support for capturing to the MonoMac bindings a few minutes ago after I saw your question, so you will need to do a little bit of work.
Steps:
Install Mono, MonoDevelop and the MonoMac addin as described here: http://mono-project.com/MonoMac
Download the latest sources for MonoMac and MacCore from Github: http://github.com/mono/maccore and http://github.com/mono/monomac
Update the MonoMac.dll to the latest version, by going into the monomac/src directory and typing "make update"
At this point you should be able to use the QTCaptureView in your MonoMac applications like any other NSView. A tutorial showing the use of the API in Objective-C is here:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/QTKitApplicationTutorial/BuildingaSimpleQTKitCaptureApplication/BuildingaSimpleQTKitCaptureApplication.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008155-CH8-SW1
You can just use the equivalent versions in C#
I'm not sure what you mean by "an object-c dll for Mono".
Your absolute best approach is to learn the platform you're targeting and port only the logic and general architecture.
To access cameras, microphones, line-ins, etc. on Mac OS X, use QTKit (Quicktime Kit). It's mind-numbingly simple to set up a web cam view, record to files, grab frames, etc. It's built in and designed to make this sort of thing mostly drag-and-drop for developers.
MonoMac is just one alternative. There are Monobjc, CocoSharp, NObjective, MObjc / MCocoa and ObjC# (I cannot choose between them). Theese are all "bridges" between Mono and Cocoa, what mean you can use Cocoa API in Mono application. But I don't want to use the API directly. I just want a dinamically linked library, which provide me some function for WebCam handling (as I said, I did this up to this time on Windows). In other words: I need a wrapper in Mono for QTKit.
PS: If I rewrite the application in object-c that means several months, and double work in the future when the application will grow. I love object-c but I hate to work unnecessary.
I tried the accepted code in XCode, and when I tried to port to Monodevelop, several classes are missing, eg. QTCaputureSession, QTCaputreDeviceInput, CVimagebuffer.
(Sorry, I cannot edit my previous messages, this is another account.)