A Technology Blog by Alan James
In the last several days I have been planning for a multi week work trip to India. In fact I’m writing this on the plane to London as it is the first chance I have had to write anything recently.
ECMAScript 6 has been approved!
It was approved on the 18th of June and brings with it many amazing new features. I’m sure I will be writing more about this in the future.
I’ll be celebrating 2 days late and over the Atlantic, but I will be celebrating none the less.
As of Cordova 5.2.0 on Android 5.1 cookies are working.
I will be investigating other platforms, like iOS, soon.
I’ve talked many times about my love of Cordova. I like how I can use my existing knowledge and code to build a mobile application with additional abilities than a web application. While I know how to a write native Android application, I still prefer to do my initial prototyping and launch in Cordova.
I honestly like everything about Cordova aside from the fact that you can’t use cookie based sessions.
In this post I will show you how to do so in Express 4 using jQuery AJAX calls and some simple code.
I have posted about theming Cordova / PhoneGap to look like native Android before but at the time Android Lolipop and the Material design were not out.
Since then the world of Android has changed a lot. Google has created a new UI design which developers are using to design their applications. It’s nice looking, elegant, and simple.
But I’m not a great mobile developer. I can make Android do pretty much whatever I want, but it takes me substantially longer to write an Android application than it does for me to write a web application. Because of that I like to rapidly prototype my applications in Cordova first and sometimes keep them in Cordova because of the ability to have one codebase that covers multiple platforms.
But web applications always tend to look like web applications and not native.
That is what Materialize is trying to change, and doing a damn good job at.
If you’ve ever used Dropbox or Google Drive you know what cloud based storage is. It’s a hard drive located somewhere on the internet for you to store and share your files.
But what if you have terabytes of files, or a preexisting server infrastructure at your work or house? Are those solutions really the best? Is there a better self hosted solution?
There is and it’s called ownCloud.
Last time I covered what Node.js is and briefly covered creating server side JavaScript applications with it. But as part of my recent desire to write everything in JavaScript I have also started writing mobile applications in JavaScript using Cordova.
I’ve written mobile applications in various technolgies and even have some on the Google Play Store, but I like writing mobile applications in Cordova more than other technology I’ve used, which are Java and Flex with Adobe AIR.