Ask HN: What's the quickest way to port a Rails app to Android?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6707785

by slaxman • 13 years ago

10 14 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We have a Ruby on Rails based web application. We have been getting a lot of requests for an android app from our users specifically so that they can access some data on the move even without an internet connection. What would the quickest way be?

PS: I am not looking to write the code from scratch. I am want to optimize the time to release the android app.

zbruhnke• 13 years ago

since its rails I would think it should be easy for you to create an API and then use those endpoints to retrieve data from the rails app and into the Android app.

This would mean a small amount of code on the Android side and some augmentation to how your rails app works, but its likely that your rails application already works alot like an API even if you didn't quite plan it that way by the nature of how rails lays things out for you.

slaxman4• 13 years ago

OP here. yes, creating APIs is not an issue. However I have never made an android app. I was therefore looking for a tool that will help me create one quickly (even if it wasn't perfect) than write the android app from scratch.

andrewljohnson2• 13 years ago

For fastest time to market, optimize the HTML/CSS/JavaScript to display well in a mobile browser. Detect if they are coming from mobile (requests headers like the user-agent tell you, or just optimize on screen size), and send down mobile pages. Many websites are designed with this in mind from the beginning, and services like Weebly and WPEngine will provide this in their form-built websites.

Otherwise, if your back-end has a usable API, then something like PhoneGap will be faster than writing a native Android/Java app.

Our marketing website takes the first approach, for our core app we write native Java.

slaxman4• 13 years ago

Thanks! We already do serve mobile optimized content. I will checkout Phonegap for creating the app. Would it allow me to store data locally?

andrewljohnson2• 13 years ago

Looks like it does: http://docs.phonegap.com/en/3.1.0/cordova_storage_storage.md...

okpatil2• 13 years ago

Phonegap seems to be a nice idea. But how do you implement CORS for such app ?

benologist• 13 years ago

Do you need to? It's not website-to-website communication.

If you do need to it's very simple, your web server has to include some extra headers:

  "Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*"
  "Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "GET,POST" // etc
  "Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "X-Requested-With,Content-Type"

mbesto• 13 years ago

Is your site already mobile friendly? If so, I suspect you could do a very quick and dirty HTML wrapper Android app that is simply a web browser.

Note - to any naysayers of this technique, getting an app out in the app store in this case is simply another distribution technique, even if the site is 100% identical to the web version.

slaxman4• 13 years ago

I have heard that Play store rejects apps that are just a web browser. Is it true or just a rumour?

th0br0• 13 years ago

Given that you're actually needing offline availability, the easiest way (as long as you've already got a mobile-friendly design) would probably be to deploy special wrappers for your DAOs (API classes, whatever), that perform the necessary caching to allow for it.

PhoneGap seems only interesting if you wish to commit the cached changes (or is offline = read-only?) upon regaining of connectivity.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

Learn Java. Write the app. Submit to play store.

slaxman4• 13 years ago

Thanks. That would take too much time though. Currently priority is to get the app out of the door asap.

MrBra• 13 years ago

Yea, and eat javabeans in the meanwhile to survive.

Ask HN: What's the quickest way to port a Rails app to Android?

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