Albretch Mueller wrote:
OK, I may not have been clear enough and I have been "gone fishing"
for quite a long time.
~
To me Java Web Start was/is an excellent technology and the way I see
things are happening with Android is that developers (must?) keep
their applications on "google play" (and a few other alternatives),
but to me there is something odd and basically wrong with that
~
It is not just about an http request, but the way google goes about
the whole "Java Web Start" thing (I would call it that to make my
(possibly wrong/outdated) point)
~
What are the options you have if you want to develop your own android
mobile apps and want to handle them from your site using tomcat as you
would (or along with), say, regular http requests and Java Web Start
applications from browsers?
~
Maybe it is due to my age and my consequently rigid brain synaptic connections, but I
still do not understand what you mean by "handle them from your site using tomcat".
When I look at a smartphone or iPad screen showing "apps", it very much reminds me of a
web page showing icons, under which hide java "applets"; and when you click one of these
"apps", a piece of code starts running and takes over the screen.
Now what this "app" does, is another story. It could be self-contained and not
communicate with anything else, like a tic-tac-toe app or a calculatro app. Or it could
be that it needs to communicate with some server on the Internet in order to be useful
(like an airplane reservation app e.g.). In that case, it needs to use a communication
protocol in order to talk to that server, and that communication protocol could be HTTP
and that server could be running Tomcat.
Now from the Tomcat point of view, whether the client talking to it is an app or a browser
or anything else which properly talks HTTP should not matter.
Unless you are talking about setting up some kind of "app store" and using Tomcat to do
that ? but in such a case, the issue would not be about Tomcat, but about creating an "app
store webapp" running under Tomcat. Or ?
I have the feeling that something fundamental may be escaping me here, but for now I am
still puzzled.
[OT philosophical section]
Apps are "cool".
The whole concept however seems to me a throwback, compared to the wonders of the Internet
and the WWW. We are going back from a WWW where any device running any
standard-respecting browser is all that is needed to run applications hosted on any server
of any vendor under any OS and written in any programming language, to a situation where
this one "cool webapp" is only available for Apple or Android or Windows-based devices.
And you have to buy every little bit of functionality separately, and scroll through 16
screenfuls of app icons in order to find the one you need, if you remember which icon it
is. And service providers, instead of developing a web application once for one standard
browser platform, now have to invest in creating 3 different redundant "apps" in order to
cover their cool clients lifestyle choices.
It seems strange to me that nobody seems to raise any objection to this gigantic waste of
resources.
Or is that my fossilised brain at work again ?
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