Rendering multiple sessions in a native (not web) iphone applications using a session renderer.

Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 5:13 AM by michelle

Example code will be posted soon. 

Well in a few weeks I'm going to submit my app, I think apple will be
hardpressed to consider it a webclipping app. I would say 50% of the
code is web dependent and the other 50 objective c. Without giving to
much away, because I'm also doing a position paper for possible
submission to Javaone. It uses a lot of phone features including
location and gps. It uses a backend server written in java to display
images from x number of upnp or bonjoir servers on your network.

It doesn't use iui or phoneGap, It uses a combination of a java
framework called icefaces tightly integrated with dashcode for the web
portion. It uses a server push technology. Clicking on the web tab
opens 1-x uiwebviews, each webview represents an independent session.
The backend uses the icefaces equivalent of comet-d to allow all the
session to "talk" to each other. That is changing a value in one
session directly affects all the other sessions.  Lets say you had a
geocaching application (which is something else I am working on) and
the iphone ui has 4 open scaleable windows to your web application.
Than each window could have a different user view of the map, say as a
scatterPlot, a hyperbolic tree and an actual map showing gelogical
data. Lets say you wanted to do gecaching, than using the location and
gps functions on the phone the web application could update each of
the 4 independent views realtime. Once more as your location changes
the application could update all users who are connected to that
application as well. At the same time they can open a chat window and
talk with each other.

Meantime the same data can be pushed to a static html location on the
phone. (yes this is possible) which can be checked perodically via
objective-c, this static info can accessed via the sdk and the respose used to issue a
NSURLRequest , thus updating both gps info and the selection pick
boxes on the screen.

By my count to try to do this with safari would require 4 browser
windows simultaneously pointing at the same location, but the app
needs to know the session ids for this to work something your not
going to be able to do with safari alone.

This is just a quick capsule of the functionality, If apple calls this
a web clipping app than they need to hire testers who actually know
something about networking applications.

Also most of the above is impossible to do with iui and maybe phonegap but I need to explore that one more.

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