With mobile web usage incrementing every year, there is a huge demand in the market for applications supported on smartphones and tablets. To help develop new applications and extend existing web applications for mobile use, the APEX development team has enhanced the product with mobile development features. Probably the most significant new feature incorporated in APEX 4.2 is the ability to build applications specifically aimed at mobile devices. Now you can easily build applications for modern smartphones and tablets, such as iPhones, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry using Oracle APEX. The jQuery Mobile framework is integrated to render an application for the vast majority of mobile devices. Besides, a new mobile-specific theme is incorporated to support touch input and gestures such as swipe, tap, and orientation change. Another theme takes care of the responsive design, to automatically adjust the interface according to different screen dimensions, which aids in using the same interface on desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices.
Types of Mobile Applications
Mobile Applications are split into two broad categories:
Web-Based: The application you’ll be creating in this chapter is known as a web-based application or simply a mobile web application. These types of applications are accessed using browsers on mobile devices. In this chapter, you’ll declaratively build a mobile web application. APEX 4.2 allows you to rapidly build applications that can be accessed on a desktop, a mobile device, or both. The mobile development interface uses a collection of templates based on the jQuery Mobile framework. This framework is designed to seamlessly run and correctly deliver mobile web applications on varied mobile devices with different operating systems. For you, as a developer, the good news is that you develop such applications with the tools you’re already familiar with. To build a mobile application, you use the same application builder, the same SQL and PL/SQL code, and similar methods that you applied while developing the desktop version. Because of a single codebase, a mobile web application can be accessed from any mobile device, irrespective of the operating system. The process of accessing such applications is very simple. All that is needed is to have the correct URL, that you put into the mobile browser and the respective id with a password. The application code is not stored on the device but is delivered by the application server. This way you can easily handle application updates. You only need to update the application on the server, allowing potentially thousands of users to enjoy the latest version. The second advantage to this approach is that you are not required to send updates to every client (as required in native applications), which ensures that the accessed application is current with all provided features. Here are some pros and cons of web-based applications:
Pros:
- Updates are uploaded only to the application server and become instantly available for all platforms and devices.
- Same application code for all browser-enabled mobile devices.
- Use of the same application-building procedures and core web technologies.
- Doesn’t need app store approval.
Cons:
- To access these applications you need a reasonable Internet connection.
- Slower than native applications because these applications are based on interpreted code rather than compiled code.
- Not available in the app stores.
- Cannot interact with device hardware such as camera, microphone, compass, file uploading, etc.
Native (On-Device): These applications are on the other side and are built for specific mobile operating systems, such as Windows Mobile, Android, iOS, or BlackBerry. Native mobile applications are written for a specific target operating system in its own supported language. For instance, to develop an application for a Windows device, you’ll use C# (C Sharp), for iOS devices it is Objective-C, and for Android, you need to be a master of Java. This means that your app is tied to a specific platform and won’t run on another. Native applications are downloaded and stored locally on the device. Because of this capability, these applications are considered better performers. Additionally, these applications have the biggest advantage to interact with different device hardware (camera, compass, accelerometer, and more). Using a local data store (SQL Lite), these applications can even work when disconnected from the Internet. As a developer, you have to handle version discrepancies because updates of these applications are downloaded manually. Let’s see what pros and cons this category has:
Pros:
- Being native, it performs better than its counterpart.
- Offline availability.
- Complete access to the device’s hardware.
- Can be added to and searched in an app store.
Cons:
- Expensive to develop.
- Single platform support. Need to build a separate app for a different OS, which means additional time and cost.
- To get space on the device’s app store, your app is required to undergo an approval process. Continue >>>
An excerpt from the book "Create Rapid Web Applications Using Oracle Application Express - Second Edition"
