Calatrava Updates :: Quarterly Briefing in Singapore - Technology Radar

[itguru haseeb]

Hi Giles,

Iam glad to hear from you. Currently what we are looking at Bosch is concrete cross platform mobile strategy. We have one of our mobile apps live "eMobility" which i did it using phonegap. In this application most of the things revolve around map, currently its a mashup with google web map api. 

The biggest challenge we came across as we went live was map performance singapore its fine as everyone here has good 3g connection however our huge customer base is in germany and they are not happy with web approach. So i then wrote a custom map plugin for our application which is under testing phase yet to go live. 

After the mentioned mobile app has gone live and the issues i have to look alternatives by then i came across Titanium, Calatrava. Calatrava impressed me a lot because of the fact i can mix views ie page (Web / Native) as per the requirement. I downloaded calatrava and tried to run a sample project however unfortunately i couldn't get through. As i dont find good user community compared with phonegap which is understandable as calatrava is still evolving. Henceforth i thought of writing you guys directly to get insight of how to get started with calatrava as i find this interesting and suitable for many of my upcoming mobile apps which requires lot of heavy lifting using native OS API's and also some places data driven forms which web also has a role to play.

It would be great if you could help me get a feel of how to get a basic calatrava app up and running a "Hello World" would also be fine and if i could get through some prototypes it would be of great help to put this across to other people in my organisation about the potential of calatrava and what can be done with it.

[Giles Alexander]

Hi Haseeb,

You're right, there isn't the community around Calatrava yet. Hopefully that will get better as more projects start to use it.

One of my goals with Calatrava is to make it as easy to get started as possible. At the moment, you'll need a Mac. Then once you've installed the gem you can use that to create a project which will contain a sample app already. This should give you something you can run and start to look at.

Broadly, there are five parts to a Calatrava project.

* The kernel: this is the CoffeeScript that is shared across all platforms and apps.

* The shell: this is the shared HTML UI. iOS and Android apps don't have to provide an HTML UI, but if they do then it's placed in here. This is also the UI for the Mobile Web app.

* ios: this is the native iOS app. Should only contain native UI and plugin implementations.

* droid: this is the native Android app, same as the iOS.

* web: this is the mobile web app.

What have you got up to with creating a Calatrava app?

Giles

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