A while ago I created an ASP.NET MVC Web Application for android devices. The application also used jQuery mobile to set up navigation etc.
At the moment, the application is simply being hosted and the androids webview accesses it that way.
The application works as expected, but I was wondering, is it possible to store the MVC web-app on the phone/integrate it into the apk?
I would like to be able to have it run the web-pages while the device is offline. I know it is possible to run simple HTML in the webview but I haven't been able to find anything about something like an ASP.NET MVC web-app. Is this done using phonegap?
Thanks.
I don't think you can do it directly with PhoneGap, from the PhoneGap FAQ
Q: Can you use PHP/ASP/JSF/Java/.NET with PhoneGap?
A: A PhoneGap application may only use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
However, you can make use of network protocols (XmlHTTPRequest, Web Sockets,
etc) to easily communicate with backend services written in any language.
This allows your PhoneGap app to remotely access existing business processes
while the device is connected to the Internet.
So if you are going the PhoneGap route, you'll have to write it in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. However if you more comfortable in .NET and C# then there is always Xamarin Android which has a free starter version that you can try out. Do realize though that if you go that route it will be a mobile app and not a wrapped ASP.NET app.
If I understand correctly I think what you want to do is serve your data via a web service (MVC4 web api is pretty simple to setup). Then you'd consume that data with your android app and you could more easily cache that data for offline use.
Related
I have an application developed in ASP.NET MVC 5 using EF6. My client needs some forms of that web app and reports on an android app. I just learnt that using ASP.NET 5, one can develop cross platform apps. How can I use my existing MVC 5 controllers,views and models with Web API to make an android app?
I have no experience with asp.net 5 and android development. I have studied a bit on internet that if I expose my data via RESTful API then I can make an Android app.
Regards.
Any web application or service can make functionality available via REST API. This basically means that you can control it and get data via GET, POST and other requests.
This means that it will be very difficult for you to expose anything but data, like controllers or views.
Since with the REST web service your app would need to be online anyway, you could just wrap your website inside an android app, similar to what BNK said or using other technologies, like a native view - should not make much of a difference.
Then basically, you have your web site (or a modified version thereof) hosted inside an android app.
I am helping to build Elpis, which is an open source pandora music player, built with C# and WPF.
Now what i want is to add an HTTP API so that the user may control the program through a browser, like play/pause, like/dislike the current song.
The point afterwards is to control the program through a mobile device accessing the HTTP API.
How exactly should i build the HTTP API so that it can control it?
Github for the project: https://github.com/adammhaile/Elpis
Without knowing why exactly you want the user to control a GUI application via the browser, it's hard to give you good advise.
Assuming you are running your GUI on Windows, take a look at OWIN and the project Katana. They allow you to easily host HTTP interfaces in your own application.
It may be overkill for your project but I would suggest using ASP.NET Web API so that you can build backend web services.
The easiest way to do what you want, assuming you really want to "control the GUI remotely" is to just install TeamViewer on your PC and on your mobile device. Then you could remote in and completely control your GUI.
But I what I think you're after is something more like Google Music. Where you can stream your music through the Internet and onto your mobile devices. If this is the case, I recommend you look at the ASP.NET Web API.
It's not hard to build a web server in C#. You can embed it into your application, and expose parts of your application to HTTP endpoints as an API. You can use the HttpListener class which is part of .NET, and do everything from the ground up yourself. Or you could use something like Nancy, which is a lightweight framework that provides a lot of useful scaffolding like URL routing.
Ended up using Kayak(https://github.com/kayak/kayak) for my self-hosted API.
The example of integration can be seen here:
https://github.com/adammhaile/Elpis/blob/master/Elpis/WebInterface.cs
I'd like to let my app on Phonegap provoke methods in my C# app. I know I have to run a server on the PC to let the app connect to the PC via local WiFi. But how do I get the Phonegap app to invoke the methods? Are there any plugins for this or do I can use a way more "easy" technique to accomplish this.
Thanks in advance.
If I understand correctly, you want to send or get data from your phone app to or from your pc/server?
If that is the case, the easiest solution would be a REST Web API on the server side(your PC), and then just do standard REST HTTP requests to your API from your phone app. A request could be a GET if you want your API to serve data to your phone app, or a POST if you'd like to send something to your API.
I'm not familiar with Phonegap but if you're using jQuery in your app you could call your api roughly like this to get, for example, all products:
$.get( "http://my-pc/api/products/", function( data ) {
alert( data );
});
I highly recommend ASP.NET Web API, Getting Started
As well as looking into the basic principles of REST, Wikipedia
I am developing an android application to accommodate some desktop software that I created. I would like for the user of the mobile app to have to verify their identity through authentication. Basically the web service will have to act as a central hub to both authenticate and hold information that the android app will need. The way I think it should work is to
-Set up a central web service
-Allow user to create account from desktop client using email/password
-The desktop client will send the information to the webservice that the android app will need.
-when android app is authenticated it will then retrieve the data it needs that was posted from the client.
So basically the service will need to be able to send and receive data.
I will only be using .net (either C# or vb.net ) for the service, so this leads me to a couple of questions:
Should I be using WCF for this? If so should I create a WCF Service library or WCF Service application?
Should I be using the Sign Sign on service approach?
The web service doesn't need to be fancy it just needs to get the job done. Is their any boilerplate project templates or projects out their I could use to help build a foundation?
I recently discovered SudzC.com which generates classes and methods for Objective-C from the wsdl data of a .net web service, and I'm fairly sure it also does Android.
I have a huge catalog of fairly 'old' web services which pre-date WCF and they are currently working perfectly.
I should point out though that the SudzC service only shows you what it can do for you for free - to get the code you have to pay ~£20 for a one year pass.
We had something similar where I worked. We had to put together an Android app for the company. If you are on .net 4.0 or newer, you can take advantage of theWebApi. It can return json or xml. So, that means any platform can utilize it (desktiop, android, etc...). I found it extremely easy to use, with very little overhead.
I have written a windows forms (.NET C#) application that encodes video and is essentially a GUI for ffmpeg.
The requirement has changed, and we now want to move the UI to a web page and have the encoding done as a windows service.
The following requirements also apply:
Two-way communication between browser's web page and service (i.e. start encoding using web interface and have service notify progress back to web page)
Service should be ported to Mac OS X too
UI should be a standard webpage (should consist of HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Flash etc...)
I was thinking of WCF for the windows service, but I have zero WCF experience.
Will WCF provide a good basis for 2 way communication between the web page and the service?
Also, I need to think about porting the service to Mac OS X, and I noticed that WCF is only partially implemented in Mono (see http://www.mono-project.com/WCF_Development).
Will this be an issue? Does anyone have any experience with WCF development in Mono?
What would be the best route to meeting the requirements above?
I would love to hear any suggestions...
EDIT
I should clarify - this is not a web application, it will run entirely on client side.
Service should run client side and interact with a webpage inside a browser (which is also client side).
If you want a UI in HTML – which is what a "UI to a web page" would mean to most – then WCF is the wrong approach. WCF is for creating highly interoperable (WS-* standards) clients and/or servers; not for web pages.
Better looking at ASP.NET MVC. This is a very different model to WinForms,1 but allows easy moving from from rendering a UI into HTML to generating XML or JSON for a Web API (behind AJAX from a Web UI or a native client).
As I understand it ASP.NET MVC is substantially supported on Mono; and this should become easier with much of ASP.NET being open source now.
See also this answer from yesterday.
1 WinForms would be less of a move, but it would then be harder to do the API side without another technology shift (albeit ASP.NET WebForms and MVC can be easily mixed in one Web App).