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[U8] Mobile
The Mobile platform is a mode of development using Smalltalk for Android/iOS devices (and others).
It is an offline mode of development in case you build an application (APK and IPA).
It is also a toolset to do image based development ON the device.
It contains a set of tools to do console mode development and testing of frameworks in console mode using Smalltalk.
Once the frameworks are tested in console mode, a runtime version of the system can be compiled (using Eclipse/Xcode) to build a debug version of applications; and use debugger to run live testing in the device.
When the application reaches release maturity it can be published in the corresponding app market as a normal mobile application.
We use the U8 Cordova framework (Cva8) to target multiple devices (Android and iOS devices) with THE SAME smalltalk code. It only requires compilation and testing with the proper tools for the target device.
Code once release many devices.
The minimal Android application (A8), includes core S8, minimal browsing tools, incremental loading of frameworks, load/save image (in local storage) and native support sample (barcode and QR scanning). It can be used as startup for native android App; and also as toolset for development/browsing/testing using your phone/Tablet.
At any time the user can upload/publish the project with the files required to build the application.
Others can fork a contribution, change any file and republish applications.
To implement a mobile application it is important to follow the Guides of each platform of execution (Android and iOS guidelines on App design) and to make it easy we published a framework to build mobile apps that arrange contents on phones.
The "[U8] Mobile Framework" can be included in your image to build apps that run on phones using DOM (in case of webview based platform) or native widgets (in case of platforms bounded directly to native support, where we are not constrained by execution in a webview). For example you can work natively with S8 on iOS (not relying on a WebView or hybrid mobile development framework) via coco8: a framework to create native iOS apps while writing ALL the application classes in S8.
Emulation of devices can be used for mobile testing, see more details on Device Mode & Mobile Emulation.
Overview of Mobile frameworks
Related pages
[U8] Review of mobile UI frameworks and components