DotNetNuke skin objects

July 28th, 2010

Building custom skin objects for DNN

In DotNetNuke terminology, a skin is a template control that imparts the overall look and feel for pages in the web site. A skin file defines the content panes with the exact position and size required where the content is to be placed. Dotnetnuke provides a wide range of skinsets by default. Besides, custom skin files can also be developed and used in websites and the skin files created will involve the use of skin objects.

Skin objects are simply asp.net user controls that can be included in the DNN skins to provide some functionality. For ASCX skins, the developer will have to specify the user control using the @Register tag. HTML skin files need to include the token for the required control and later the token will get replaced with the control while parsing the skin for upload.

Each skin object has its own set of attributes. For ASCX skins the attributes can be specified in the skin file itself. whereas for HTML skins, a separate file is maintained with the attributes specification.

There are many core skin objects say, login, breadcrumb, menu etc. included in the DNN which implements the most common and widely used functionalities and these can be found in the Admin/Skins folder of your DNN installation. Apart from these there might be a requirement for the DNN developer to create a custom skin objects. Custom skin object development is similar to the custom module development.

Skin objects prove to be a very powerful tool to add common UI uniformly to all pages of the website.

DNN Team @ SoftwareAssociates

Tags: ASP.NET, dnn, skin object
Posted in DotNetNuke, Microsoft, research | No Comments »

Actionscript3 / XML Image gallery

July 21st, 2010

A slick Adobe flash web gallery application built using Actionscript 3 and XML by our Flash development team.

The gallery has three sections, each with a few images

The image path, image title and description are loaded from the external XML file and the images, titles and descriptions can be changed without changing the flash movie, while the description and text field supports HTML and CSS.

The XML file can be replaced with mySql database and, can be accessed through JSON or Web services.

Sample XML gallery

References.
http://code.google.com/p/tweener/

Tags: json, web services
Posted in Flash, HTML | No Comments »

GPS, GIS and Tablet devices

July 19th, 2010

GIS using Android and iPhone tablet devices

We all know that GIS is the merging of cartography and database technology whereas GPS is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides reliable location and time information in all weather.

Using a combination of GIS and GPS, it is possible to create innovative applications for industry verticals. Assume yours is a multi location service operation or a retail store chain located at the suburbs of a metropolitan like New York or London. Field staff or people on the move have requirements to access enterprise data, and often in map formats (GIS). It could be about instant availability of a product or a service across these locations or tracking of an asset within a building using custom google maps. Large retail formats can have bespoke maps to enable customers trace products on the rack using locator services.

GIS based android applications or iPhone applications can simplify your search.needs. Senior sales staff working on field would be able to connect with existing CRM solutions to access information on outlets, customers, suppliers or warehouses. The possibilities are endless and using a combination of GPS services and middle tier tools, it is now possible to integrate these tablet devices with enterprise data, enhanced by the power of GIS.

The one touch feature of tablet applications scores over cumbersome web applications that would require a log-on authentication, download of web page etc. One could define custom map points as the network expands.

We build and integrate custom map solutions with GPS integration for production, warehousing and consumer retail stores for asset tracking and enabling production data using a mix of ready to use frameworks for iPhone and google Android tablet devices.

Tags: android application, iphone, London, new york
Posted in Android, Google, Google API, Maps, apple, iPhone, research | No Comments »

Silverlight charts using visifire and asp.net

July 19th, 2010

A drill down chart is an interactive component that lets the user drill down through levels of data thereby providing a rich user experience. It is a common requirement in projects to create reports for different levels of data. Recently our research and development team experimented an open source charting tool visifire which makes use of the Microsoft silverlight plugin in the browser and JavaScript to render the graph. Since it is done on client side the server response is made lighter. These charts can be embedded into desktop or web applications or even into mobile applications (Windows phone 7 series). Visifire does not provide a ready to use feature for creating live charts that can be drilled down to lower levels, which can however be achieved by making use of javascript events. Visifire has got an in-built event handler to invoke these events triggered while clicking on various points on the chart. Let’s see how this can be done.

Consider the example of a column chart which gives the year wise project completion status for a client. Now, on clicking on one of the columns, it should show the number of projects completed in different platforms (say .net, php, iPhone, android etc), for that corresponding year.

For the second level of chart to be rendered, the click event of the first chart should be captured which calls a javascript function, which can be implemented by adding a few lines of code as follows, before rendering the chart.

//vChart1.preLoad = function(args)

{

chart1 = args[0];

chart1.Series[0].MouseLeftButtonUp = function(e)

{

onMouseUpProjectsPerPlatform(e.AxisXLabel);

};

}; //

On clicking one of the columns of the first chart, a call is made to the javascript function ‘onMouseUpProjectsPerPlatform’, which accepts one parameter, the AxisXLabel of the first chart, which here is the ‘year’ selected. On obtaining the year, we can render the next level, by generating the required xml. This can be done entirely from the client side, but in most cases, we will have to pull data from the database and generate the xml from the server side. To generate the XML from code behind, we can make use of pagemethods or webservices.

Rendering of the chart from the server side is accomplished using RegisterStartUpScript,. However this is meaningless in a webmethod, and we have to return the xml to the calling function.

//function onMouseUpProjectsPerPlatform(var year)

{

// call to the web method, which returns the required xml.

//}

We can now render the xml to the required HTML container element from the OnSucces function of the webmethod call.

//function OnSuccess(xml)

{

vChart2.setDataXml(xml);

vChart2.render("htmlElementID");

//}

In the above instance, we can add a third level which gives the month wise project completion status for that year and selected platform.

Dotnet team @ Software Associates

Tags: ASP.NET, Silverlight, visifire, xml
Posted in .NET, Silverlight, research | No Comments »

iPhone, Android and Webview

July 15th, 2010

iPhone explains UIWebwiew as "You use the UIWebview class to embed web content in your application. …..".

Android explains it as "A View that displays web pages. This class is the basis upon which you can roll your own web browser or simply display some online content within your Activity.…..".

Well is it limited to displaying web pages ?

Developing network based applications has always been challenging for developers. Well what makes it so challenging? For a desktop application we can assume that the resources will be available on demand. But when dealing with a network based application there is no guarantee as to whether we will receive the requested resource or even if it exists. Therefore the application must capable of recovering from such exceptions.

The two key factors affecting performance are latency and bandwidth. In desktop applications it doesn't matter much if you are accessing resources serially, but when it comes to network based applications, things change. Latency is more or less the same for every request. If you are accessing multiple resources serially, latency adds up and the delay increases. So as developers it is our job to reduce the effect of latency, which points us to parallel access of resources.

For this we could modify the system such that, the downloading of data is performed in the background, hidden from the end user. In such a situation, the user interactions are still possible, thereby masking the actual delay.

There are different ways of implementing this. But we need to adopt the method which presents us with less inconsistency, less code and less worry.

Consider a system, which requires loading images in sets of ten at a time. Here, the view will be filled with hundred or more images arranged in a grid, more like Mozilla’s Add On ‘Cooliris, but without that cool 3D effect. Now, you integrate an audio player which performs online streaming. The obvious solution for this will be using a separate class.

Let’s see how these can be implemented with lesser amount of coding without reducing the performance or consistency.

Taking the case of image loading, create a UIWebView, in the place of an UIImageView. Append HTML script to a string, which would load the image, load the webview and handles everything else for us. Here HTML script would be script tags with an img tag having source specified to that images url.

Once these initializations are done a webview would be displayed and its content is fetched on access. To have more control over the webview, implement the functions declared in its delegate protocol UIWebViewDelegate. This allows us to handle events such as loading webview, loading finished, link clicked etc.

The size of the webview can be changed easily in accordance with the image size by just finding the image size using javascript and adjusting the webview accordingly.

Coming to the audio player, there is no need for creating a class which handles streaming, playing, pausing etc. Webview can implement the same functionality in a much easier way. Initialize the webview with the URL of the file to be played and you’re done! A separate class can be substituted with just a few lines of code.

Some android tablets had an issue in supporting the Android Google API. By creating a local webpage which loaded a map using Google Maps Javascript API V3, this problem can be solved. It is also possible to create a javascript interface in an activity which helped in accessing resources from the local webpage during execution.

Definitely webview is for displaying webpages and its contents, but utilizing it in right places at the right time gives us much more than that.

iPhone/Android Development Team

Tags: android application, android google, android tablet, iphone, webview
Posted in Android, Google, apple, iPhone, research | No Comments »

Connecting with iPhone and Android tablet PC

July 6th, 2010

Protocols for connecting ERP solutions with tablet PC

We can consider different protocols to enable connection between enterprise data and hand held devices such as Apple iPhone and Google Android to write software programs for android applications and iPhone applications. They are SOAP, JSON and XML-RPC.

SOAP has a security extension which can be used to define features such as encryption, data integrity However being an XML standard, it only defines the standard. XML-RPC provides no such feature. JSON has security issues as the data passed is generally directly executed by the server, hence susceptible to data injection.

SOAP

Advantages

Widely used.
Suitable for complex structures.
Standardized by W3C.

Disadvantages

Consumes larger bandwidth for small data.

JSON

Advantages

Handy for light weight data transfer
Can take almost half of the bandwidth as XML for transferring the same data
AJAX with JSON has got accepted well since JavaScript has the inbuilt capability to handle JSON data.
It does not require parsing libraries in an application as XML does

Disadvantages

It is not standardized
Not recommended for complex structures

XML-RPC

Advantages

Extremely easy to understand, implement, and debug
Lighter than SOAP.

Disadvantages

Not being maintained by a standards committee
Lot more more complex than SOAP. eg., passing an object as an argument to a function.

Tags: android application, iphone application
Posted in Android, Google, apple, iPhone, json, research | No Comments »

Applying push and pull for Google Android and Apple iPad

July 5th, 2010

Welcome to the tablet era

Internet changed lives and the information age. The mobile computing devices are here to change personal computing habits. The ubiquitous PC, since IBM invented is finally beckoning change. First generation buyers would now prefer an iPad or an Android tablet over the bulky desktop or the expensive laptop and the stripped down net book. iPad sold over 6 million since launch and now targets 15 million before the first anniversary. Hardware vendors are ditching proprietary systems and adopting android operating system as their next platform and buying a desktop operating system is turning out to be a thing of the past. Sub $200 dollar hand held devices are already in the market. Cloud computing would make shrink wrapped word processing software products irrelevant.

The corporate heads like style and convenience. IT managers should be able to work from any location to configure their server farms and sql-databases. Middle managers would access information with ease using touch screen devices. Operational staff should have daily figures pushed onto their personal tablet devices. Physicians want end of day admitted patient information status on life style devices. They all need applications that provide data access between hand held computing devices such as Android tablet, apple iPad to connect to existing information systems (ERP, CRM, SCM,HIMS etc)

SMS enabled information engines available in the markets enable some of these operations, but are restricted by length of text, limited pull functionality and lacks convenience.

Are mid sized companies ready to empower their employees for mobility ? Do we have plug and play technology in place to connect to existing business objects without adding needless computing power or incurring unplanned budgetary costs ? Do we build these systems from scratch ? Thanks to recession, times have changed,- for everyone wants a cost saving solutions and they want it now.

TabletStack is a ready to use middle tier and mobile client solution to connect your existing databases to hand held devices such as Android tablets and Apple iPads. These are backed by a software product engineering team which brings nearly 2 decades of expertise to your cost advantage.

Standard features, benefits and offerings

Configure data connectivity in under 30 minutes
No need to build additional web services
Scheduled push of information ticker
Pull based information on demand service
Stateless application, consumes little bandwidth
Standard HTTP protocol for firewall friendly access
Connectivity with relational databases such as Oracle, mySQL, Sql-server and DB2
XML-RPC protocol as the standard for information exchange
Data encryption and support for ssl
Saves frequent referenced data locally on sql-lite
Trace IP addresses of client requests
Trace location of requesting client
MAC Id blocking
White labeled applications for OEM vendors and web partners

Tablet PC application development

Two way sync of data between tablet PC and enterprise information
Query By Example (QBE) to define your information stack

Android Tablet and Apple iPad application areas

ERP data access for field staff, remote location management
Weekly push based reporting for top and middle management
Stock alerts and drug interaction warnings for pharmacists
IT infrastructure management alerts
Data collection for scientific analysis
Information on demand service for physicians
Conduct organization surveys and opinion polls
Fleet management and accident repair
Club membership management and custom reporting
Preventive maintenance for production units
Information ticket for circulars and alerts
Custom connect to open source suites such as Sugarcrm, oscommerce etc

Call or write to us for more information on how our expertise in iPad and Android application development could seamlessly enable enterprise data connectivity for your clients with Android tablets and apple ipads.

Tags: android application, android tablet, apple ipad, ipad application development, tabletstack
Posted in Android, Google, Maps, apple, erp, iPhone, sql server | 1 Comment »

Adobe flash vs HTML 5

July 3rd, 2010

When Apple launched the iPad , its lack of support for the flash browser plug-in started the HTML5 vs. Flash discussions. Does HTML5 really beat flash? HTML5: could it kill flash and silverlight? Will HTML5 replace flash? And so on…

As developers who work with the Flash platform, we like to point out a few of our observations.

HTML5 promises to bring rich interactive web in the future. Object animation, tweening effects, and video that have long been the domain of Flash. One of the upcoming features of HTML5 which is considered as a Flash killer is the new video tag. You can view the videos without a flash player plug-in !!

But there is a formidable hurdle to cross. Browser vendors cannot get to agree on which codec the video tag will support. “Ogg Theora” was the recommended standard video format in HTML5 and now will support H.264 video codec.

Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the Ogg Theora/On2 VP3codec. Safari, IE 9 and Chrome supports the newer H.264. All major browsers support either of the two codec. YouTube is already showing some videos in HTML5.

Ogg Theora is an open and royalty-free codec, but it is not as efficient as H.264. Google’s Chris DiBona stated that if Youtube were to use Theora as its codec, it would take up most of the available bandwidth on the internet.

Mozilla has also problem with H.264 codec because it would violate the principles of free software.

And there are few questions; Do we have facility to videoconferencing in HTML5? Do we have facility to live audio/video recording in HTML5? Are we able to add dynamic objects over the video? Can one add captions for the video?

HTML5 standards are yet to finalize and formulating them would take time. This would mean a lot of pain for the web designer / programmer over browser compliance.

HTML 5 is a programming language which needs to be interpreted by the browser. It is up to the browser to interpret that language and display the content. If the browser can't render the code, strange things start to happen in the display. Different browsers on different platforms interpret the code differently and browsers display the content as they see fit. Until HTML 5 gets standardized, each browser will interpret it differently.

Here are some lines from Lee Brimelow’s blog

“Now this is not to say that in the future, maybe they will all agree on an implementation. If that happens and it performs better than Flash, then that is how I will be delivering my videos as well. But another thing to point out is that Flash video is used for a lot of things beyond basic playback. Flash supports embedded cue points and alpha channels and is often used in ways beyond the traditional YouTube playback scenario. So while HTML 5 video looks promising, it is clearly way too early for people to be writing an eulogy for Flash video. Remember also that while the browsers get their acts together, Flash video will continue to evolve as well.”

Let us look through the flash gaming industry. Sony has sold 33.5 million playstation 3 units, Microsoft moved 40 million X-box 360 units, Nintendo 70 million and Farmville alone has 80 million active users.

Flash has so many attributes which cannot be easily replicated in HTML5.

Speed – ActionScript 3 Flash is so much faster than current Javascript implementations with the use of new Action script Virtual Machine 2.

Preloading – In flash it is byte-level preloading but in HTML5 it is object-level preloading.

Tweening and timeline animation – It is not easy to create time animations and tweening in HTML5.

Flash games can easily distribute as a single swf file and converted in to desktop applications using Adobe AIR.

Testing Flash and HTML5

Jan Ozer, an expert in video encoding technologies recently put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two against each other on both the Mac and PC and on web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

Mac Tests

With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%

With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)

With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU

Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.

On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0

In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU

References:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_html5_really_beat_flash_surprising_results_of_new_tests.php

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1698

Tags: adobe flash, HTML 5
Posted in Adobe, Flash, browser compliance, research | No Comments »

Android app for freight logistics industry

June 22nd, 2010

Android tablet – database connectivity

The client, in business for over a quarter century, is amongst the largest cargo movers in the nation and has deployed a country wide enterprise resource planning solution to manage the business operations spread over 400 locations, serving over a million small businesses.

Predominantly handling consumer goods from door to door, there is often a need for the shop owner – manager to know the status of parcel boxes ; whether dispatched, in-transit, arrived or being delivered.

The client has now offered Value Added Services to priority customers – an Android application which can be downloaded and installed on to android hand phones, to seamlessly connect to the central n-tier server, that queries the real time database for the requested waybill number, picks up the relevant information and displays map based location and consignment status.

Features and benefits – android tablet application

Stateless – low server load and bandwidth usage
Firewall friendly HTTP protocol
Connect with industry standard SQL databases (sql-server, Oracle, mySql)
Load balancing and scalability
Automatic service discovery for mobile devices
Push events handling to enable polling
Supports server farms
Detection of authorized hand phones
Forward status messages to e.mail IDs
Custom messages for rows and columns
Configure pay as your go service
GPS integration
User query statistics to improve customer satisfaction
Stores frequent numbers locally
Disable service / maintenance mode

Interested in us building a similar android application white labeled for your client ? Call us today

Tags: android application, firewall friendly, freight logistics, load balancing, service discovery, waybill
Posted in Android, Case studies, Google, database | No Comments »

Android tablet application

June 22nd, 2010

Android applications ; connect with sql-databases

Android tablet for mobility

This Android project is possibly one the first of its kind in the industry. Our client, a leading hotelier was on the looking for an easy to use mobile application for restaurant order management that would talk to their existing bespoke ERP suite built on an open source relational database, a middle tier application and a set of desktop client applications to manage operations such as housekeeping, inventory, kitchen order and front office. Being amongst the top eating places in the city, the restaurant had a regular clientele, who enjoyed the traditional cuisine being served.

The challenge was in building a thick client application on a the android tablet device that communicated with the legacy database, preparing kitchen order tickets and posting them to production. Since there were no ready to use SOAP components, our engineers used industry standard RPC communication frameworks to enable the android app talk to the middle tier – which in turn transacted with the SQL relational database. The android applications' SQL Lite database was engaged to store basic configuration information and temporary order records. The user friendly GUI ensured that non technical end user managers were able to take orders and suggest the best combination of speciality dishes to the discerning client. The application is under beta release for client feedback with enhancements planned for the next schedule development sprint.

SqlLite
Remobjects remoting middle tier server on Windows 2008
Relational database
Tablet PC running Android version 1.67

The middle tier framework is designed to support industry standard databases such as Oracle, Sql-sever, mySQL, pgSQL, FirbirdSql and DB2 express C

Interested in building a similar android application for your client ?

Call us today to discuss the possibilities.

Tags: 0racle, android application, android tablet pc, sql lite, sql server
Posted in Android, Case studies, Desktop, Google, database | No Comments »