A technical review of the GIST foundation project to build a multi channel radio player app for the community media association as the basis of a shared learning experience around mobile technology.
- 1. Community Media AssociationPlayer App Review Mobile
Developer Group 24 thJanuary 2011 @ianibbo This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
2. Why?
- To help structure our learning
3. Real deadlines 4. Need to simplify down to essentials 5.
Discover team roles / issues 6. Discover client expectation issues
7. Discover technical problems / innovations 8. (And see if it's
possible to deliver something substantial as a community
project....) 9. What is it
- A Cross device app to play the range of stations streamed by
Community Media Association.
10. Architecture Streaming Server Twitter Mailing List Website
Backend App PhoneGap CMA Player App 11. Technical Choices(1) Native
or HTML5
- Ease of Reuse vs Native Functionality / Look and Feel
12. Desire to see what can be achieved with HTML5 app 13.
Initial Dead ends with HTML5 element cross device 14. Breakthrough
with Tool support for access to native libraries via JavaScript.
15. H/T to Jimmy Wales & Net Neutrality comment. 16. Technical
Choices(2 Post HTML5 choice)
- Multiple Cross Device Toolkits Around
17. Trialled many, JQueryMobile,... 18. PhoneGap seems right
balance of ease of use and functionality 19. Reasonable access to
phone specific API's 20. Good per-device communities / Support 21.
Devs reasonably free to select web frameworks of choice 22. Final
Approach
- n-Tier architecure. Servers, aggregator / service layer.
23. HTML5 web app 24. App gets management info from service API,
streams directly from Streaming Server 25. Why Middle Tier
- Missing station detection
26. Pre-parsing and processing ease burden on client app Just
deals in clean verified JSON, no XML parsing client side. 27.
Ability to enhance and augment station data before supplying to
client 28. Usage Tracking 29. Approach - Strengths
- HTML5 / Javascript Reusable, readily available skills
30. Makes cross device apps with shared codebase possible 31.
Multiple development platforms 32. Really Easy to Develop 33.
Multi-Function App, less likely to be rejected by store 34. Team
seemed to work well (Looks at @guru) 35. Approach - Weaknesses
- Access to some native controls problematic Specifically volume
in our case.
36. Does depend on a server component Single point of failure
(But then so is the streaming server) 37. Looks different to a
purely native app 38. Still experimenting with background play 39.
Live Demo (eek!) 40. Community Project Angle
- Is it possible to build something substantial in the short term
on a community basis rather than a commercial basis.
41. To have a shared learning experience 42. ..and deliver
something solid and useful to a local organisation along the way
43. YES! 44. Summary (1)
45. PhoneGap really easy to use 46. Works well with other tools
47. Familiar technology 48. Obvious it doesn't produce native apps
49. Does the job Does it do it pretty enough? 50. Community Project
Awesome! 51. Summary (2)
- Huge thanks to the team for supporting this GIST project,
@guru, @jagusti, @billbest.
52. @guru and @jagusti are ace team member and you should work
with them! 53. @community_media and @billbest are ace too, you
should work with them too, and support them in any way you can! 54.
PhoneGap worked best for us as a cross-platform HTML5 development
tool. 55. Discussion
56. Any Feedback on App greatly appreciated! 57. Thanks! 58.
Refs / Notes
59. https://github.com/gistfoundation/gist-cma-player
