A few newbie questions from a Flash / web developer

Getting Started Newbie Questions
#1

I’m about to start working on an app to compliment a local event promotion website I launched and have a few general and specific newbie questions about app development. I’m sure these have been asked numerous times so I apologize in advance - I did scroll around a bit and search the forums though.

Coming from zero app development experience, I was wondering how different screens within an app work. I used to program VB6 and it was common to just set different groups of controls to visible / invisible depending on what content the user should be looking at. So if a user clicks a News button, the app’s home screen content all goes invisible, the news content is loaded from the internet, and the news controls are set to visible (which is what also happens in Flash). Is this generally how screens work or am I way off?

Also, is there a way to load a web page inside an app (like an i-frame)?  I am hoping to have a map for an event location in the top half the screen and the event details in a scrollable window below the map. As I’m mainly a web developer, it would be much easier for me to display content through an in-app web browser than download the XML data and try to parse and present it inside the app.

Thanks for your input!

#2

In general, yes, that’s how things work.  You have some content and you show it and hide it as you need it.  Most people use some tools called scene managers that handle the transitions of screens from one scene to another.  We offer the storyboard.* API calls as our officially supported scene management tool.  Another popular 3rd party is the Director scene manager.

iFrames in mobile development is known as WebViews.   We offer the native.newWebView() API call to bring HTML/ CSS/Javascript from a webpage into your app.  There is however very little in communications between the webview and the native app.  Must like an iframe is supposed to be a hands off block that just gets included in the page.   We do support our network.request() API call (and network.download()) that will let you make REST API calls to web services and fetch JSON and XML.  Corona SDK is much much friendlier with JSON data because they are very analogous to Lua Tables. 

#3

This might be a ridiculous question, but is there anything stopping me from just building a mobile site and simply including it in a fullscreen webView container? This way all the data parsing and display could be done in HTML / PHP. My app would require internet access to get the data regardless so excluding image / page rendering speed, is there any serious drawbacks to doing it this way?

#4

Yes.  Apple will not approve apps that are basically wrappers around a website.  The android stores are much less picky about those things, but Apple with 100% certainty will reject it.

#5

In general, yes, that’s how things work.  You have some content and you show it and hide it as you need it.  Most people use some tools called scene managers that handle the transitions of screens from one scene to another.  We offer the storyboard.* API calls as our officially supported scene management tool.  Another popular 3rd party is the Director scene manager.

iFrames in mobile development is known as WebViews.   We offer the native.newWebView() API call to bring HTML/ CSS/Javascript from a webpage into your app.  There is however very little in communications between the webview and the native app.  Must like an iframe is supposed to be a hands off block that just gets included in the page.   We do support our network.request() API call (and network.download()) that will let you make REST API calls to web services and fetch JSON and XML.  Corona SDK is much much friendlier with JSON data because they are very analogous to Lua Tables. 

#6

This might be a ridiculous question, but is there anything stopping me from just building a mobile site and simply including it in a fullscreen webView container? This way all the data parsing and display could be done in HTML / PHP. My app would require internet access to get the data regardless so excluding image / page rendering speed, is there any serious drawbacks to doing it this way?

#7

Yes.  Apple will not approve apps that are basically wrappers around a website.  The android stores are much less picky about those things, but Apple with 100% certainty will reject it.