maqetta/maqetta — Issue #1298: Docs for deploying a Maqetta-created mobile app
Author: JonFerraiolo
Created: 2011-11-30 16:42:43+00:00
State: open
Labels: Docs, Mobile, Priority Low

@jhpedemonte, @billreed63

Need to post public docs. Here are some notes:

To deploy your app so it works but with poor network performance:

* In Files palette, click on first icon (download entire workspace) to create a ZIP file for everything in your workspace. (Second icon allows you to download only selected files.)
* Transfer the ZIP file to your web server
* Create a new folder (e.g., /f1/) in the public area of your web server
* Unzip into that folder. You should be able to run the mobile app in a browser by going to http:///f1/file1.html (or whatever you named the HTML file)

However, 2 significant problems with Preview 3:

* Bug: Preview 3 injects duplicate dojo.require() statements into the HEAD. You'll want to manually edit the HTML file(s) on your web server to remove the dupes
* Performance: Preview 3 doesn't integrate with Dojo's build system. Builds are essential for reasonable performance in mobile browsers. Adam Peller (cc'd on this list) ran the Dojo build system on the sample mobile file (http://maqetta.org/dojoconf) we showed at Dojo Conference in September. I don't know the details for now to run the Dojo build system on Maqetta-generated files. Preview 3 uses Dojo 1.7 and I don't know if the Dojo Web Builder service (http://build.dojotoolkit.org/) supports Dojo 1.7 yet. Adam, do you know, and if Dojo Web Builder isn't ready, yet, can you sketch out manual steps for Mandeep?

To deploy as an "app":

The approach most people take for installing a webapp as a native app is to use PhoneGap (http://phonegap.com). It provides tools for taking HTML+CSS+JS and making it into a natively installed app. We know at least one Maqetta.org user who succeeded with going all the way to PhoneGap, but running Maqetta content in PhoneGap triggers one more bug in the content that Preview 3 generates. For some reason, the text content of a dojox.mobile.ListItem cannot be in the 'label' attribute and must be child content. This user had to manually edit his HTML files to move the text content to get things to work.