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Developing a mobile web application with IUI

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At LeaseWeb we have a hosting control panel called “Self Service Center” or SSC. We are starting to make our first steps into making the Self Service Center available on a mobile platform.

We have a couple of options on how to implement this:
• Build native applications for each mobile platform ( mainly Android & iOS )
• Build a mobile accessible website

We had to make a list of advantages and disadvantages of the 2 options:

We prefer to keep a single code stack, for maintenance reasons, and so we can make every feature immediately available in the mobile version. This is why we decided to make a proof-of-concept of a mobile accessible website.

The first problem we encountered was to find out how to implement this mobile website the best way possible in the Symfony framework. At first, we checked if this was possible by doing only CSS changes, so without touching the templates. It did not took us long to come to the conclusion that this was not enough and we had to revise all of the templates.

By looking up the API of the Symfony framework on a mobile device we saw that they had a mobile version of it on their website. We were very curious what technology they used and how they implemented it, so we started digging. We found out that they were using the IUI framework on their mobile API page and although it didn’t work flawlessly we were impressed with the way it worked.

So what is this IUI and how does it work?
With IUI you have to think of your webpage as 1 big HTML file which you keep adding content to. So you keep updating your current HTML with new adaptations through AJAX request. When you click a button / link the new page is loaded off-screen. When the screen is loaded it slides smoothly into your screen. The old screens are not unloaded so you can smoothly slide back to the previous screen using the back button in the upper left corner.

Figure 1 – The red box shows the area that is visible on the screen, the other pages can slide in.

Using this framework you can make any webpage feel like a native iPhone application. A single IUI web page can contain multiple related iPhone screens. This makes IUI map on the Symfony MVC framework quite nicely, because all the data of a single MVC view will not fit on one iPhone screen, but it might fit on multiple.

Also for backend developers it is really nice that you don’t have to design all the screen layouts. You can just follow the layout that is provided with the framework and your screens immediately look professional. Although we created an impressive proof-of-concept there were some problems we did encounter:

A broken back button
When you post a form with validation errors, the same page – containing the form – is loaded with the errors displayed next to the input fields. This new page has the same id as the old form causing the back functionality to be broken.

The IUI back functionality works using a “stack”. This stack contains the ids of the previously loaded pages and forms. When the page loads it adds the id to the stack. When a validation error has occurred the stack contains the wrong values, because the validated form and the original form have the same id.

The possible solutions we found are:
1) To fix this we can give the validated form a different id than the original form.
2) Show the (validation) errors on a new page or popup.

An iPhone like way to handle field validation error is to show popups containing the validation errors. This can be achieved in IUI using “Dialog” type forms. First we tried using JavaScript “alert” calls but we had trouble, because these pop-ups are blocking and it is hard to use them without modifying IUI internals.

Displaying flash messages
More or less the same problem occurs when displaying “flash” messages. “Flash” messages are messages often colored yellow, red or green (for warnings, errors and confirmations) and are set on top of the screen displaying the results of the last page load. In IUI the flash messages are not working properly because pages are not reloaded on “back button” navigation. In an iPhone application these messages typically show in a popup.

Conclusion
We think IUI is a good and easy way to convert your current website to a mobile website in a MVC framework. Problems we encountered are related to error and status messages that a typical web application shows inside (and on top of) forms. Unfortunately IUI does not seem prepared for showing these. We’ve found a workaround by showing these messages in “Dialog” type forms.

LeaseWeb Self Service Center – https://secure.leaseweb.com
IUI framework – http://www.iui-js.org/
Symfony framework – http://www.symfony-project.org

The post Developing a mobile web application with IUI appeared first on LeaseWeb labs.


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