Next Meetup Topics

[Ken Collins]

So I had an idea for next meet-ups. Perhaps we can continue the discussion on mobile JavaScript applications. One item of interest to me is hearing from people that have taken their MV* JS applications to iOS or other devices. Case in point, have you done an app that has drag and drop and then had to something like shim in touch events to jQuery. So basically solving all the little problems to make sure you application works from the desktop to mobile.

Thoughts?

[Roy Wilson]

Here is another idea, maybe just for conversation, not meetup.

Any experience with RhoMobile, a ruby-based development platform for
multiple mobile devices?

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Roy Wilson, Ph.D., M.A., M.S.
Jury Simulation Research
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[Ken Collins]

That does look interesting. Odd, seems Iike I should have heard of this but it never came across my radar. I have always thought these types of frameworks are a bit too magical for my taste, but I would love to chat with someone that has used it before and could answer some questions.

 - Ken

P.S. Welcome to the group Roy, see you at the next meetup.

[Roy Wilson]

I'm only at the "I only know what I read" stage, but that might be
enough to answer a few questions..

[Brennan Dunn]

I haven't used RhoMobile, but I have played with (directly and indirectly) PhoneGap and trigger.io

Most of these basically wrap a native-looking webpage with a manifest, etc. in a full screen web view. They also provide a Javascript API that serves as a bridge to core functionality of the device - file storage, address book, camera, etc. While the Javascript bridge seems to work pretty well, there are a lot of issues UI-wise that I've ran across. For instance, the JS library iScroll sucks on Android, as does a lot of the stock functionality of Spine Mobile.

...Otherwise, if you want a quick and dirty iOS app and don't like writing Objective-C, they're not too bad.

[Ken Collins]

Brennan, would mind contributing to just a hack night and round table on this and other ruby, javascript, mobile alternatives? I plan on giving away 3 copies of Alex's "JavaScript Web Applications" too.

 - Ken

[Roy Wilson]

Brennan,

The difference is claimed to be the following: RhoMobile uses a
ruby-based scaffold to generate native calls to the respective SDKs.
If I understand correctly, the binary that goes to the device is
generated via the relevant SDK.

Of course, there are some snags reported :-).

Roy