thinking out loud - Appery developers 'corner' ---- user group...

[Bruce Stuart]

Going to ask the question here - if folks would like to see the creation of a user group / or / if I might use the words - a Proactive community for Appery developers - that's run by community members, for the benefit of the developer.

The end goal - to be proactive, get ahead of challenges we all face, share ideas and / or best practices, and be a 'safe zone' where people can come - if they're looking for a solution that might be 'out of scope' in this forum.

Finally - I think sharing "wins" from the community as a whole would be awesome - I personally don't hear enough about great apps others have done, how they did it, and inspirations that others might follow.

Respectfully - I think that this forum and a 'developers corner' both have a place - and that we need this getsatisfaction forum to solve day to day challenges. However, I don't see this forum as the place for idea sharing, recommending alternative approaches, developer education, and shared leanings - that we all likely have.

Drop me a note here if you'd like to see such a group. I'd also of course love to hear what the support team thinks!

[Jeffry Reed]

Hello Bruce,

I think this is a good idea.

One of my initial thoughts is that this a good idea in that many of the technologies discussed are general or third party and thus "outside the scope of appery support" from appery support team perspective. However, although such technologies are general or third party - implementation in appery is indeed specific to appery and therefore should not be outside the scope of support. I guess it a gray area. Many times I try things in appery that don't work while they do work on their own. However, from experience I know better not to ask appery support because I know they will decline even though appery is the part causing incompatibility.

Another thought I have is that I think appery is designing their platform and recommending design strategies that are not best per se but benefit appery monetarily as an API call has a cost. Along the same lines there are many technologies that compete with appery and therefore not advantageous for appery to recommend or support. An example would be device storage. Appery offline support is proprietary and very poorly documented or supported.

anyway, I think its a good idea, just not what would be the best way to approach this where they would both coexist purposefully.

[Bruce Stuart]

Jeff .... well thought reply. I think one of the big questions becomes contributing content .... I know you're active here ... do you think enough folks are willing to contribute ideas and content to make this valuable ?

[Jeffry Reed]

Bruce,

its hard to say how how many folks here have the skills and inclination to contribute. Obviously there are folks here with significantly varying degrees of knowledge and ability to share, myself being a good example. When I started with appery I had no experience with the specific technologies. I look back at how novice my questions were... and I still have so much to learn. However, I have a formal education in CS (bs and ms) and I get paid to do this so possibly I may be in a position to meaningfully contribute.

Here is one topic I think may be a good candidate for community collaboration. Some of the things I know I consider intellectual property of the company contracting the work. As such I may not be at liberty to share a particular implementation strategy. However, as you know its very easy to reverse engineer cordova apps if not addressed. (lol, I have found master keys hard coded in apps obtained from public distribution sources, one that was even promoted on the appery blog). So to mitigate infringement of intellectual property as well as improve security I will be obfuscating as much as possible. This is something I will be glad to share.

Another thing I would be willing and possibly have something meaningful to share is implementing libraries and plugins. I use a variety of 3rd party libraries including Kendo UI. While I have a commercial license, the core (https://github.com/telerik/kendo-ui-core) is still one of the best libraries in existence. I would be glad to share my experience with stuff like this as well.

[Bruce Stuart]

Jeff ... perfect ... I'll set something up ... and start a new post with an 'announcement' . It would be great if you could share something straight off . I assume you'd be willing to be an admin as well ?

My thought ... something simple and extremely visible like a Facebook group .... ? We need simple and visible ... I know some folks won't use Facebook ... however the visibility imo is critical.

Your thoughts ?

[Jeffry Reed]

Sure, I have lots of examples of stuff that I had initially found challenging but now understand. What do you think about this for a first discussion: geocoding and markers... I have been waiting for another team to implement goecoded addresses in the main db, which has taken longer than expected. As an interim solution, I parse the data from LS, batch geocode the addresses with geocod.io (you get 2500 free per day) then parse the result with the original array, then save to LS, then finally show the markers on a map. First time around it takes around 8 sec to geocode 300 addresses and display markers on map, subsequent page loads take a 1 sec.

[Bruce Stuart]

Sounds great ... I have some examples in the geocoding area as well ... so it will make for hopefully some interesting reading ...