CaseBook – check it out!

Welcome to casebook

Right, I have setup a preliminary website for CaseBook, which is just a small demo of a “facebook” like clone (skeleton) written in Smart Mobile Studio. So whip out your iPhone (it is presently only written for iPhone, but you can probably use Android as well) and point your mobile browser at: http://lennartaasenden.magix.net/public/

Once loaded, remember to create a shortcut to your phone’s home-screen, then exit the browser and start it there. When you start it from your phone’s home-display it runs fullscreen rather than scaled.

The next step

At presently it only displays a handful of pre-defined articles, which of-course is not what we aim for — so the next step is to add a TQTXDataset to handle articles, and then use a RemObjects server to read data from.

And last but not least, we will add the ability to add articles. These will only exist temporarily either on the client or the server – since I suspect it would be filled with rubbish otherwise and blow the database. So we have to watch out how we write the server to avoid database exploits.

Timeframe

Fairly simple stuff

For those that have been following my articles, it may seem that I have spent ages on this — but fact is that I have only spent a combined total of 1 workday – most of it adapting a few custom controls. The reason it has taken so long between articles is because I try to spend 1 hour a day doing something useful, like coding the database table, the QTX library, the effects library and well as other chores. So CaseBook has not been high on my list.

I have no idea how long it would have taken to author this in pure JavaScript, but I suspect all the technology combined would take at least a week or two. If we remove the dependencies (iScroll and Font Awesome) there is still the work of components and OOP mechanisms – which under JS would be very hard to code (so the grunt of the work is actually invisible).

Why such a demonstration?

The reason is because I wanted to show that you can write exciting web applications that rivals “native” apps written in Delphi, C# or Objective C. If I compile the project with Phonegap as it stands right now – the project has full access to things like camera, disk IO, geo-location, services – and all the rest. Just like Delphi does. But at a fraction of the development time – not to mention the price (!)