/mobile-first

Primary LanguageShell

This is a work-in-progress, at this point not usable by any but the most ardent. Follow developments on the blog. Find setup guides on the wiki.

Mobile Test app (sens)

This is an exploration to create mobile-first, disconnected applications for field tests which can be run from a server, or installed on mobile devices.

Some of the things of interest:

  • putting useful logic simply into a single-page app and allow disconnected function;
  • exploring the 5M data limit (size, off-line validation, etc.) in an installable app;
  • cordova deployment to mobiles (e.g. iOS, Android, ...);

Some colleagues have commented on the (bleeding) edginess of both angular.dart and cordova. I expect most of the dart2js results will stay in a mostly central area of cordova - I don't expect any significant trouble. As for angular.dart on a cordova target - I have no idea. Angular dart tutorials seem to work fine. I think that what trouble may come will be from mixing dart libraries. Angular.dart 0.12 seems ok, 0.13 seems to be coming along. Note that cordova's stated goal is to obsolete itself, so that all device-special API points will gradually show up in HTML5. Since, at the outset, we are not using any device specific features, I am satisfied to use cordova as an execution and installation shell. As for dart - ECSMA-6 seems influenced by aspects of dart which feel like a modern language. The dart team is working to get dart accepted as an standard. In the meantime, I am more than happy to minimze or eliminate dealing with the messy javascript ecosphere.

I have several goals here:

  1. To establish a toolchain and workflow to get from angular.dart app to mobile running application, with testing and debugging in between. Follow the wiki for help in setting up your development environments. Look at the blog for ongoing developments and hints.

  2. Identify libraries for managing the various sizes of target devices. Examples are included as git submodules, including angular.dart.ui, a pure dart port of twitter bootstrap. Other examples for your testing are the angular.dart.tutorial and paper.elements, a polymer.dart library which initially had some conflicts in running under angular.dart projects.

  3. An example application, which can be used as a starting point for your own mobile-first, which can operate network-disconnected. To this end, the example will show use of the lawndart library to select the local storage based on the capability of your client device. The example will also include deferred data binding with a server (a django example is planned).

For starters, the Recipe Book AngularDart application from the angular-dart-tutorial is a good starting point and trial app to flush out your developmenet setup.

See the repository wiki for information on setting up a working environment.

Note: Cloning this repository clones the wiki pages as a submodule.

Developer notes may be useful to have locally. For OS X, Atom and Mou provide markdown rendering.

Feel free to update the wiki thru git. Simply cd to mobile-first.wiki, and git commit from there.

Note: I use git submodules here. It's simple, but takes a little getting used to. The key to remember, submodules are separate git clones - in general, think of them as if they were separate clones (pulling, editing, commiting, pushing from them). Committing from this repository (the containing repository) will also require updating the submodule, but only to keep indexes consistent. You will get used to it.

To get started, make your first clone:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:yarko/mobile-first.git

To continue to get submodules automatically, either descend into the submodule directories and pull (or ftch) from them, or, from mobile-first, use the command form:

git pull --recurse-submodules

useful cheat-sheet on git-submodules, see git-submodule-cheat-shet