[devccm]

Hi everyone,
I am an old school java guy that has been using eclipse from literally it’s inception, using smalltalk before that. I stopped architecting and software systems in 2008 to do something completely different that I failed and lost all the money working crazy hours building systems – to put it simply…. Last system i did was in JSF/Spring/Hibernate and some authentication engines (stuff you see wheny you log in and get a text or phone call, etc). I got by with my HTML and Javascript for small stuff but now this is apparently the game to be working in which blows my mind but ok.

Guys I am lost and confused. I hope I can get some input here because i want to start going and tired of reading and not sure which way to build this. Here is what my project entails (I have both MobiOne and MyEclipse Spring):

***
I want to build a web app that runs on iPhone and Android and will communicate to a server side solution built in Java and hopefully hosted thru Google App Engine. The app is not a crazy one at this time (more so text/input fields, etc) but I have no idea which way to go. Here is my plan and hopefully you guys can just give me some help:

a). Develop iphone solution and android solution using mobiOne. I am most likely going to create two separate projects to make sure the look and feel follow both sides. I am guessting this is normal?

b). Develop using mySQL, hibernate, spring, and create spring services (simple singletons for behavior) to access business logic. Going to see how this Scaffolding works… House this on Google App Engine for Java. This would be normal server side business solution. I am assuming this makes sense?

c). Here is the I DO NOT KNOW PART… I have no idea how to control the communication and state (what would be a session with a regualr browser for servlets/JSF/Struts) between the phone apps and the Spring services that have my business logic/models. Can anyone:
1). Point me to a website, reference, book, examples of how to do this
2). Tell me what is the best solution to do this.
3). Do I just use the servlet engine solution and then how do i parse the response on the other side AND
do i need to send it over a special way. Or do I need to use a solution that works with AJAX (which is what web services –
something I do not know at this time as we used JSF to handle that )…I am reading about JavaScript frameworks and libraries and
not sure if I need to use Ember.js or some of the others listed on compares (in articles comparing 7 frameworks/templates) and if
those can work inside MobiOne the best, etc. I do not want to start learning these or only picking one if I have to to get going.

d). Again I have only designed on paper so far, but want to start coding — is there a way to setup MyEclipse running in debugMode and talking to a WebApp on MobiOne on the same machine and debugging? A lot of that i guess will determine if I can run Tomcat to serve the data and have MobiOne be able to access it in their debug
e). For an app like this I also would want to store some data for authentication to the server? How is that done? Does MobiOne provide a solution to store that information as well as some data that would not need to possibly be refreshed for a week on (or unless requested by phone app) the phone in a transparent way for iphone or android.

There are always more questions but this will help me at least connect the two development environments up and then help me to understand what I need to be using on the java side for communication and then what i need to do on the phone app side. I could not tell you how thankful I would be if some would share your wisdom. I thought my days of programming was going to be finished and now I have to catch up and start all over again after 16 yrs of doing it and 4 off where i lost everything i made in 16. Thank you in advance

[support-michael]

hi devccm,

Lots of good questions. Give me some time to work up a response; will probably be multipart due to the breadth of topics.

[devccm]

Thank you very much Wayne…

Getting both myEclipse to communicate with MobiOne would be great…

I did some research this weekend (the world of js/html/css seems to now be the world of the server side guys but i digress) and it seems like a good architecture and steps to move forward would be:

1). Use Spring for MyEclipse in regards to the server side models and datastore (MySQL, Spring Hibernate, Spring framework/POJO/Business Logic, etc)
2). Use Spring MVC with RESTful web services and communicate back and forth using JSON (some jaskcon project)
3). Use MobiOne to develop your web apps for android and iOS
4). Use javascript to communicate to SPring MVC 3.1 RESTful service.
5). Use some javascript framework to help you work with JSON data — I am looking at Ember and Backbone.

Caveats/More Questions
————
*Spring for MyEclipse now supposedly supports 3.1 MVC (I need to purchase still)
*Need to understand if RESTful web services will be responsible for moving the pages along in the webApps or is that going to be more for Ember.js or Backbone.js or JScript in general to now manage (which seems like redundant code in two different webApps possibly).
*SpringMobile now is out there — but unsure if it just has added a detection ability or if it provides better solution based on user view flow.
*Always more continuing questions

Guess we will see.. Thank you for your help and time

[Author]

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