The 1.2 release of Tabris.js will come with a glimpse of a very powerful new feature: custom widgets. Which problem do they solve? And how do they work? This blog post will provide you with some background and answers. Tabris.js enables you to write JavaScript applications that render a native UI on iOS and Android devices. This requires a JS execution environment on the devices to create,...
Read MoreWriting mobile applications is not only about the UI. Apps also need content. Often times they fetch dynamic content over the network. This post introduces the basic mechanism for network access in Tabris.js: XMLHttpRequest. The post also explains how higher level networking API can be used. Tabris.js supports a subset of the W3C browser APIs. Part of that API is the XMLHttpRequest. You can use it...
Read MoreTo create a rich interactive UI, the predefined widgets of your platform and corresponding toolkit are often not enough. You want to draw something yourself. Tabris.js provides just that - the Canvas widget for your own drawings. The Canvas is totally empty by default. To draw on it, you use a Context object with numerous drawing functions. These range from simple geometric shapes like rectangles, circles...
Read MoreWhat do we talk about when we are in the kitchen? About OSGi, of course. Many of us at EclipseSource are using OSGi as base-technology in different projects since a long time, some of us in really old projects. From time to time we were enviously glancing at the new possibilities that came with recent OSGi releases. Whenever you hear about something new, as a developer...
Read MoreWelcome to the third episode of the "Tabris.js Examples" blog post series. In each post we provide some background on one of the coding examples shipped with Tabris.js, our new framework for developing native mobile apps in JavaScript. After we explained a couple of UI elements in the last issue, now let's take a look at how you can store the acquired data. For this purpose...
Read MoreWelcome to the second episode of the "Tabris.js Examples" blog post series. In each post we provide some background on coding examples shipped with Tabris.js, our new framework for developing native mobile apps in JavaScript. This time we want to take a look at user input - a fundamental ingredient of most applications. Tabris.js supports a variety of native input widgets you can choose from. The...
Read MoreWelcome to our new "Tabris.js Examples" blog series. In each post we will take a closer look at one of the coding examples which show the capabilities of Tabris.js, our new framework for developing native mobile apps in JavaScript. You've already had the chance to see the examples in action on your phone when using the Tabris.js Developer App which also lets you directly browse...
Read MoreDeveloping mobile apps, especially when targeting multiple platforms, can be cumbersome and time-consuming. The time to compile and deploy an app to a mobile device really adds up. In this post we introduce you to a much faster development cycle using Tabris.js to write mobile apps. The experience is comparable to web development except there is no HTML involved. Tabris.js apps consist of JavaScript files that...
Read MoreAs we are working towards our next Tabris release 1.4 in June, we decided to post regular feature previews. This one is about the upcoming feature we call "markup support". Markup support is available in RAP since version 1.5 milestone 6. Now we will get it into Tabris, too. Markup support is your tool of choice if you want to pimp the styling of any (non-editable)...
Read MoreThe latest release of RAP 2.0 is still hot. It also contains some improvements for unit testing as Ralf Sternberg mentioned in one of his blog posts that came along with RAP 2.0. The following post will get you up and running with the first JUnit test in your own RAP project. A user interface written with RAP is executed on the server side. This requires you...
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