I've seen a lot of discussion of web-only solutions for mobile Drupal, but very little about native applications, whether that means iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Phone, or something else.
This goes beyond arguments of whether HTML/CSS/JS or Java/Objective-C is easier to program for, and more to how Drupal fits into a mobile app world - for instance, what's the story if I want to use Drupal to send push notifications through to an iPhone or Android app to alert them that there is new content? How would I integrate Drupal content into an iOS in-app purchase or Android Market in-app billing? How would an existing digital magazine integrate with iOS 5's Newsstand?
I don't think that Drupal needs to have any of that in core. What I do think is that Drupal will not be competing with just WordPress and Joomla in the future - instead it will be competing with solutions like Parse that are just coming out and aren't PHP/MySQL CMS's.
It could be that the answer is that no one has had that itch, so it just hasn't been scratched! And that's a fair answer.
Thoughts?
Comments
drupal doesn't need to do much
I use Drupal (D6) to serve the back-end of mobile games I write that accept payments via IAPs (iOS, Google wallet both with and w/o android, PayPal, BlackBerry IAPs) and have found that there is a little the module needs to do, but not much. I coded it directly into the game's module rather than writing a separate module.
I'd be happy to share my experiences. With the exception of PayPal, most of the code necessary lives in the client, not the back-end. A little HTML is necessary to set the stage for the client interaction, and PHP code is necessary to add the processed purchase to the user's account (all user accounts for my games are stored on the server), but that's it. The theming is more involved than the coding, IMHO.
Possibly a useful module would know how to take a list of IAPs and turn them into the proper bits of HTML for consumption by the different mobile clients (of course, they all do things differently). The handoff between the back end and the client that actually processes the IAP does need to be coordinated (and the saving of the purchase, and the handoff back to the back-end, I suppose).
Important also is there is not "one true way" to do it. I'd be happy to share my code that works, but others also may have code that works even better than mine.
Joseph Cheek
Apple In-App Purchase module + Drupal 7
Hi!
You can use 'In-App Purchases' module - http://drupal.org/project/iap
-regards, Alex
CSS JS + Drupal + PhoneGap
any suggestions on the best CSS/JS framework which will give us the native experience and faster as native apps.
I am thinking about angularjs or trigger.io.
Thanks,
Parm