I'm looking to develop an offline version of an application that still needs to connect to the live site to retrieve the information and store results.
The application is for an online course system, that now needs to work when an internet connection is either unavailable or flaky. The system currently tracks each page viewed of the course (with flash and video content) and then also displays and tracks the taking of multiple choice exams. This all needs to be provided offline. I'm thinking that the program will connect through the users account at the start to download either a portion or all of the course, including exams and then at the end connect again to upload the results. (It'd be cool if it could do the process automatically when a connection is available.) The application needs to look similar to the online version and needs to be easy to use (easy install, little user input required for upload/download of results).
I have done a bit of research and it looks like Adobe AIR might be a good middle ground between the online version and an offline version.
My biggest issue is that I don't have experience developing desktop applications as I am a PHP developer, so I'm looking for something like AIR that bridges the gap. (The online version is a LAMP application.)
Has anyone used Adobe AIR for this type of offline application? How easy and secure was it?
Are there other solutions out there?
I think AIR is a great choice for this. I use AIR all the time now for in house utilities I write.
The built-in database and persistent store are great.
From your description, it sounds like Google Gears is a little closer to what you're looking for.
Adobe AIR is a great solution for this. We are building something similar. But we are facing problems in resuming downloads if the download process gets broken.
Related
I want to build a project on "Live Vehicle tracking system" using J2ee.following are my basic ideas-
a website from which end user can track the vehicle(tracking can be done on Google maps).
a GPS system embedded in the vehicle so that it can send location to the server.
i think of using J2ee.please suggest me whether to use this or any other language.
This is basic idea.please make correction if necessary.
Thank you
We are making sort of application using Spring ZK framework Maven and Mysql. Also we have our device for vehicle tracking. We already have some application made for tests. I can guarantee that J2ee is appropriate solution for it. We didn't have to made for example almost non of sql queries - all of them is easy to generate. We have experience in that field for 7 years and with different tools so yes that's good solution.
I was wanting to use a file sharing server to keep certain files up-to-date and constant across multiple instances of my application across multiple computers - like (for example) writing a multiplayer game, which stores all the player's positions in a text file, and uses something like Dropbox to keep the text file constant across all the applications, and each application instance can change the file with that application's player's position, and then the rest of the applications can update accordingly. This is only an example, and is not what I intend to do using this technology. What I want to do does not rely on fast sharing of data very quickly - but only periodically downloading and updating the text file.
I was wondering how I might be able to do this using the Dropbox API for Objective-C without prompting the user for any Dropbox username/password - just store a single Dropbox account's login information, log into it automatically and update/download the file stored on it?
From what I have found out from experimenting, Dropbox prompts users for their passwords via a web-broswer, and is designed to accommodate multiple accounts, whereas I only need to accommodate the 'Server' account.
So, is there anyway to do this sort of thing using the Dropbox API, or should I use something else. Or do I need to find out how to write my own server. Using some sort of file sharing API seems a lot easier to me than writing an actual server.
Thanks for any help,
Ben
You might think about using Google App Engine (GAE). I had a similar requirement recently and I'm thinking this is a good option when you want centralized data. Plus you can do the no-browser account login by using your own custom authentication, or I think it's even possible via OAuth? Depends on how sensitive the data is I guess. I just rolled my own.
From my research I found that using Dropbox as a server has some issues with scalability, since you'll be limited to maybe 5,000 calls per day. source It's built on Amazon S3, so you could also look at using that directly.
GAE lifts that limit up to 675,000, but can be increased up to 91 million for free.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
I did find an open-source project for doing this with Java, alternative you could look at Python example
I've written a daemon that continuously checks for updated files and syncs them. I wrote it for my own file manager iOS app. You can find the implementation here:
https://github.com/H2CO3/MyFile/tree/master/DropboxDaemon
I'm personally not an iOS developer but I came across this question while looking for something else and thought I would offer up another potential solution to the OP's question.
Microsoft just released something called Azure Mobile Services which supports iOS development (among other platforms). It's basically a convenient way to set up a back end system complete with push notifications, authentication, etc. without rolling your own. You don't need to know anything about Azure or servers as the setup process walks you through most of it. It is new so keep that in mind, but it looks promising for situations like this.
Here's a 10 minute video explaining how to use it with an iOS developed app along with links to more documentation:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/iOS-Support-in-Windows-Azure-Mobile-Services/
Hope this helps.
I wrote a few iPhone apps using Core Data for persistent storage. Everything is working great but I would like to add the ability for users to back up their data to a PC (via WiFi to a PC app) or to a web server.
This is new to me and I can't seem to figure out where to begin researching the problem. I don't want to overcomplicate the issue if there is an easy way to implement this.
Is anyone familiar enough with what I am looking to do to point me in the right direction or give me a high level overview of what I should be considering?
The data is all text and would be perfectly stored in .csv files if that matters.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a good all-purpose solution under the current SDK. Here are some ideas:
If you only want backup, you could just back up the whole sqlite file to the server or over wifi, but you then can't really use it with anything other than Core Data (and you might even run into trouble with iPhone-Mac compatibility, e.g. between 32-bit and 64-bit types).
A very robust solution would be to implement cloud storage with a REST API and sync the iPhone and desktop app to the server (this is what the Evernote app does, for instance), but that is obviously much more work.
You could also manually convert your data to a .csv and send that to the server or desktop, but parsing it could be problematic (and you'd have to worry about the data getting corrupted). If you did want to go that route, here is a tutorial.
I develop flash based games and currently we supply our games as projector files to our clients. Should I make the jump to AIR?
Yes.
(sorry, couldn't resist.)
I don't know projector enough, but it should be worth your while if it is like other flash files, ie no access to the underlying system.
With Adobe AIR you get
- Access to the local file system - you can read and write files (there are some restrictions)
- Access to an sqlite database on the clientside, which could be handy for storing 'stuff' in
Furthermore, in the next version of Adobe AIR you will be able to interact more and more with the system and other programs your flash/air is running on.
Check out this link for more info on what's coming in Adobe AIR 2.0 - halfway down the page there's an entry from september that gives you a link to Mike Chambers presentation in "Flash On The Beach".
An recent article has prompted me to pick up a project I have been working on for a while. I want to create a web service front end for a number of sites to allow automated completion of forms and data retrieval from the results, and other areas of the site. I have acheived a degree of success using Selenium and custom code however I am looking to extend this to a stage where adding additional sites is a trivial task (maybe one which doesn't require a developer even).
The Kapow web data server looks to achieve a lot of this however I am told it is quite expensive (currently awaiting a quote). Has anyone had experience with this, or can suggest any alternatives (Open Source ideally)?
Disclaimer: I realise the potential legality issues around automating data retrieval from 3rd party websites - this tool is designed to be used in a price comparison system and all of the websites integrated with it will be done with the express permission of the owners. Where the sites provide an API this will clearly be the favoured approach.
Thanks
Realised it's been a while since I posted this, however should anyone come across it, I have had lots of success in using the WSO2 framework (particularly the mashup server) for this. For data mining tasks I have also used a Java library that this wraps - webharvest - which has achieved everything I needed