Anyone tried PhoneGap and Ultralite ?

[former_member184221]

Hi has anyone tried PhoneGap/Cordova with a Sql Anywhere 12 Ultralite/mobilink plugin on iOS or Android ?

i.e. Able to use ultralite/mobilink native code inside a PhoneGap plugin. Allowing the screen and business logic of the mobile app to be witten in HTML5/CSS3/JS. But the database and replication uses Sql Anywhere 12.

[jeff_albion · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

This topic (PhoneGap (Cordova) / Ultralite integeration) was recently discussed on the old Sybase Newsgroups. See the following post from our product manager, Tom Slee about this subject:

     http://nntp-archive.sybase.com/nntp-archive/action/article/%3C510d8712.6ed8.1681692777%40sybase.com%...

Regards,

[former_member184221 · Accepted solution]

Jeff

Yes thanks for that, I know Tom Slee from my Sybase days. However the discussion just made me more nervous about the future of Ultralite / mobilink

Interesting reading anyway.

Looks like I will have to spend a day knocking up a PhoneGap plugin with Ultralite/Mobilink just to prove it works.

David

[jeff_albion · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

However the discussion just made me more nervous about the future of Ultralite / mobilink

That is interesting - I interpretted the discussion slightly differently. My interpetation of Tom's comments was that our product direction is more focused around 'platforms' and less about the details of the specific 'products' that are involved. MobiLink and UltraLite are expected to continue as a stand-alone developer 'products' in the SAP SQL Anywhere suite and are planned to be integrated as components in the SAP 'platforms' for the future.

Since we currently offer a full development suite for multi-device development ('SAP Mobility Platform'), it was not clear to Tom for the UltraLite product direction to build in functionality to compete with ourselves by providing development plugins for PhoneGap (Cordova).

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From a technical perspective, I am not sure if this solution (creating a native plugin) is even viable, but it could possibly be based on what I've read about native plugins for PhoneGap. Something to keep in mind is that many of our APIs are mixed managed/unmanaged APIs with native and managed DLLs (ADO.NET, JDBC, etc.), so this may make deployment (of the unmanaged resources) more 'difficult' over PhoneGap - I am not sure.

Also notably, PhoneGap supports additional OSes than the UltraLite native APIs do, so your solution may lose some of its 'cross-platform' support if you're using one of the other OSes:

          http://docs.phonegap.com/en/2.4.0/guide_plugin-development_index.md.html#Plugin%20Development%20Guid...

Looks like I will have to spend a day knocking up a PhoneGap plugin with Ultralite/Mobilink just to prove it works.

I am actually interested if this is technically possible myself, even if the wrappers are not currently written for PhoneGap - I haven't had an opportunity to try it out myself yet. Could you perhaps share your thoughts / experiences with us on this endeavour?

Cheers,

[former_member184221 · Accepted solution]

Yes if it works I will certainly share it within this "Place" for everyone's benefit as it would turn ultralite into a HTML5/CSS3/JS tool.

The PhoneGap plugin would be different code for each platform, I will start with iOS and Android. The idea being to keep the interface to the plugin the same.

I am sure it will work because Jan Schober has already done a simular thing with SUP - which has Ultralite and mobilink running inside the plugin. But run the plugin from PhoneGap rather than HWC.

See Jan's blog: http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/mobility-platform/blog/2012/11/15/adding-native-object...