With the proliferation of new device models, form factors and operating systems, you may be thinking about the challenges to make your application work handle all of these different device properties information as there may be features that rely on specific characteristics or capabilities.
As an example, how frustrating it would be for the user trying to use a mapping feature if the device doesn't support geolocation? Or, just getting the device screen height and width to make sure the content fits nicely and also dynamically present different things on the smaller / larger real state you have available. As a developer, it's your responsibility to make sure everything works and looks good on all devices (even though this is a hard task).
The Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) utilizes Apache Cordova to provide access to device properties, SMS, Email, Contacts, Camera, Pictures/Photo Library, Geolocation, Accelerometer, Network, etc. that can either be accessed from Java, JavaScript and Expression Languages in order to support these requirements on your mobile application.
Additionally, the most common functionality (sendEmail, getPicture, createContact, sendSMS, etc) is exposed as a Data Control and can be simply dragged-and-dropped onto an AMX page reducing the need for coding calls to the API and constructing the necessary screens.
The MAF documentation covers all in details but here is a list of what's currently supported by the framework (through the embedded Apache Cordova API):
- device.name
- device.platform
- device.version
- device.os
- device.model
- device.phonegap
- hardware.hasCamera
- hardware.hasContacts
- hardware.hasTouchScreen
- hardware.hasGeolocation
- hardware.hasAccelerometer
- hardware.hasCompass
- hardware.hasFileAccess
- hardware.hasLocalStorage
- hardware.hasMediaPlayer
- hardware.hasMediaRecorder
- hardware.networkStatus
- hardware.screen.width
- hardware.screen.height
- hardware.screen.availableWidth
- hardware.screen.availableHeight
- hardware.screen.dpi
- hardware.screen.diagonalSize
- hardware.screen.scaleFactor
Most of the property names are self-explanatory and I won't go into the details of each one of them but there is a demo available for you that shows how to get started and use some of the information that the framework provides. Screenshots on both platforms are available below so you can take a peek what it looks like:
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| iOS Simulator |
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| Android Emulator |
In summary, integrating the device features into a Oracle MAF application is easy and flexible, the declarative drag and drop support suits most of the use cases and you can get deeper control programatically.
The source code is available here: https://github.com/mjabali/DeviceFeatures
Have fun!
