Vijay Software

WordPress 5.5 Version Is Here. Things To Watch Out!

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 06:46:07 +0000

Fans of WordPress have a reason to celebrate with the recent release of popular PHP based Content Management System (Version 5.5). There are some major improvements the WordPress team has made into the latest release that makes it easier to manage a website. Project Gutenberg has contributed to a great editing experience with the latest 5.5 version. With the blocks, you can create awesome pages quickly. Each block is an independent space into which you can add additional components.

Things To Watch Out Before Migration

If you have an existing Website built with WordPress, please make sure that you take the latest backup before going for an upgrade to the newest version. Chances are that your plugins or theme may have issues with the new release. If something goes wrong, you should be able to revert to the old code.

One of the major issues in the latest release is the lack of support for the jQuery Migrate library. Many themes and plugins depend on this library to avoid conflicts with jQuery versions. If you encounter such issues, contact the plugin theme developers for the latest release addressing those issues. It is a good idea to update all your plugins and themes to their latest version.

Overall, the 5.5 release will make WordPress one of the best Content Management Systems available in the market.

Facebook Campaign

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 05:21:34 +0000

Facebook Ads is a very attractive proposition to small businesses and companies with limited resources for marketing. There are several advantages of a Facebook campaign compared to the traditional advertising campaigns.

One of the best things about the Facebook campaign is that you can create and manage at one place, all aspects of a marketing campaign (the ad creation, the audience specification, budget, reports, etc.). The Facebook ad creation tool brings a lot of resources together to create an advertisement on the fly. Unlike their comparatively dry, text-based PPC cousins (ex. Google Ads), Facebook ads can be made powerfully visual. The very best Facebook ads blend in seamlessly with user generated content like posts, videos, images, and other visual contents.

Facebook Ads allow the users to target their audience based on geographic and demographic attributes. Facebook analytics (Pixel), provides useful data about how the advertisement performed on the target audience. This info can help you to identify the reaches of your business and fine-tune your future campaigns for better results.

Facebook Ads are remarkably affordable. With a budget as low as $5/day, you will find your ad reaching thousands of Facebook users in a day! From our experience. a Facebook campaign consistently yields more results than that of a Google ad. because it shows advertisements where people are mostly engaged like in Instagram, Facebook posts etc.

Want to try out a Facebook Ad campaign? Contact Us. We can set you one up quickly!

Experience with the hybrid application

Thushara V — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 04:09:54 +0000

Photo by Balázs Kétyi on Unsplash

Recently we developed an IOS app with the hybrid application approach. We choose the hybrid approach to use our existing web coding skills. The biggest advantage of a hybrid application is that it can convert to different platforms without redoing the code. For example, we can port the code of the IOS app to an Android app.

The frontend is built upon ionic Angular JS. As everybody knows, Angular is a Javascript framework for maintaining an MVC coding structure to the project. The ionic framework has Angular JS and Cordova support.

The back-end for our app is built with the PHP Codeigniter framework. We added forms to input data to the MySQL database. We also created a web service in Codeigniter to handle the dataflow between the app and the database.

Error Reporting

Smartphone developers have to deal with a number of errors. Most of these errors are from various devices that are running the app. An error reporting mechanism can give us more feedback into the working of the app like which page encountered the error and what caused the error. We implemented the error reporting with the help of stacktrace.js. It is an excellent library that reports errors at its core level.

In-app purchase issue

We didn’t find any suitable in-app purchase plugin available in Cordova. So we had to add our own Objective C class in the project that implements all the in-app purchase functionalities. Cordova Javascript code was to execute it for the in-app purchase.

Submission Issues

We faced multiple problems from the App store during our submission. One was about the App icon not available for different resolutions. The final rejection was about in-app purchase restoring when installing on a new device.

Overall, our hybrid application development was very exciting and challenging. But for our next project, we chose the native approach because the project demanded more hardware support.

Season’s Greetings

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 06:08:22 +0000

API, How It Helps To Build Applications

Honey Joshy — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 06:30:39 +0000

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

API stands for Application Programming Interface. Imagine the following scenario, where a web and mobile application shares the same data. For a web application, you can access the database layer by writing server-side code in PHP or ASP.net, etc. But what about a mobile application? Here arises the need for a well-defined API that provides access to data to any requesting application. An API avoids the complexity of interacting with database layer coding for each platform. The usage of API is now very common.

How API Helps?

Weather API is one of the best basic examples one can use to understand the benefits of API. This API [https://openweathermap.org/api] provides real-time data from a huge weather database containing data from around the world. Using this API, we can show the weather update in our application. This is one such example where API is used. Another example I can think about is the Products API provided by Amazon. Using this Products API, a developer can integrate thousands of Amazon products in a Web or Smartphone application.

Parsing API

Every programming language has its own set of libraries to parse data from the API. Using these libraries, a developer can parse the data and rendered it in a meaningful way as required by the end-user. Recently, I used a library called Retrofit in my latest Android application. It handles does all the heavy lifting API parsing, that frees a developer from writing code for efficiently parsing the API.

How API is Requested and parsed.

The following API request shows an API request and its response. Note that the request from the browser includes q=London, which tells the API to return the weather details of London. Next step is to parse the API response and render the output to appropriate html.

API Request: https://samples.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London,uk
API Response:
{“coord”:{“lon”:-0.13,”lat”:51.51},”weather”:
[{“id”:300,”main”:”Drizzle”,”description”:”light intensity drizzle”,”icon”:”09d”}],”base”:”stations”,
“main”:{“temp”:280.32,”pressure”:1012,”humidity”:81,
“temp_min”:279.15,”temp_max”:281.15},
“visibility”:10000,”wind”:{“speed”:4.1,”deg”:80},
“clouds”:{“all”:90},”dt”:1485789600,”sys”:
{“type”:1,”id”:5091,”message”:0.0103,”country”:
“GB”,”sunrise”:1485762037,”sunset”:1485794875},
“id”:2643743,”name”:”London”,”cod”:200}

We can parse the above JSON data to display data in the UI elements. The main advantage of an API is that it can bring data to any platform, like iOS App, Android App or a Web site.

Read our app development experience with an external API.

How To Avoid WordPress Upgrade Nightmare

Archana E P — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 09:22:59 +0000

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Why Do You Need An Upgrade?

A WordPress blog gets several updates periodically. The upgrade is necessary for the following reasons.

* Security

* Performance

* Features

* Compatibility

Be Cautious

If we are not careful about the upgrade, it can give us a hard time. It will be a nightmare for developers especially if the website has a large number of plugins. After the upgrade when you browse the website you may be shocked to find several errors due to reasons arising from breaking the plugin, theme compatibility with the new version and so on. Another reason for the errors can be due to the server upgraded to the latest PHP version.

Be Prepared

So the safest way to avoid such a difficult situation is to have a development server with the same environment ready by cloning the production server. First, perform a WordPress upgrade on the development server. If you find any errors with the plugin or theme, contact respective developers for a compatible version. The problem arises when the original developers are not available. You have to change the code all by yourself. Resolve the development server errors one by one by troubleshooting the plugin and the theme issues. Note down the changes you are making at the code level to repeat them in the production server.

Before doing the upgrade on the production side, have a backup of the database in case of any unexpected errors. In my experience, most of the errors are coming from the plugin side.

I have found a very nice blog post https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-update-wordpress/282117/#close on the wordpress upgrade that describes the best approach.

Our Experience With Native Android Application Development

Praveen A — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 09:19:31 +0000

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Recently we had a project to be developed in Android to mimic an IOS app. As we had expertise in both native and hybrid application development, it was a big question of the approach suitable for the current project. We first decided to go with the hybrid approach. But later we decided to go with the native approach considering its benefits. Native app development has the significant advantage of being able to easily access and utilize the built-in capabilities of the device like Camera, Addressbook, and GPS. So the user experience with the app will be superior along with faster performance.

A Native Android app development requires good knowledge in Java coding.

Objective

The purpose of the app was to make the Doctor-Patient consultation easy. There were two apps to develop, one app for the doctors and one app for the patients. We were provided with API to get the data shared between Android and iOS apps.

Challenges

For getting data from the API, we decided to use a REST client which is better than writing our own code. Using such a library reduces the coding time and improves the performance of the app. We evaluated Volley and Retrofit for that purpose. After considering various factors we decided to use retrofit REST Client.

One problem we faced was getting push notification delivered to the app. The doctor should get a notification when a patient requests a consultation. We found firebase is the best option to use. Integration was easy by adding the library reference to gradle and coding was easy as expected.

For video chat feature we used OpenTok platform which iOS app was using. Chat with the single user was easy but adding multiple users to the chat was an issue. We resolved it quickly by contacting the OpenTok support team.

Another issue we faced was regarding the image size. The profile image was taking more time to render. We used the Picasso library to improve performance. Picasso handled images, while also taking care of caching and keeping a low memory impact when doing image manipulations.

Why you need an on-site consultant?

Gijo George — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 07:00:15 +0000

The big question: Do you want a person with limited experience or would you rather have a team that has years of experience to find and or create the solution that fits your needs?

These days, software applications play a major part in the running of any organization. Doing business without a properly configured technology platform could lead to ultimate chaos in an organization.

For example, an E-commerce solution, mobile application, social media, contact forms …. that send their data to a CRM that would help a business to track all those leads that are originating from different sources and which can ensure follow-up of each lead. Likewise, an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system can integrate all the vital functions of an organization and the effective management of the business is made possible with the maximum utilization of resources.

Whatever the case, the software or solution needs to be selected on the basis of the current requirement as well as the future needs. Scalability, as the organization grows bigger, is one of the key issues to be addressed here. Here comes the role of a software consultant who can fine-tune your business requirements and help you to choose the best software or solution that would meet the current and future needs. A software consultant has the responsibility to analyze the existing system, how the business is done and help management to decide what is the software or solution that is best suitable for the business under review. Based on the cost consideration and other factors, the consultant could lead management to select a customized software solution or an off the shelf one. This solution is documented in a functional specification, that is the roadmap and blueprint for the entire current project but also can and most often included future expansion as well.

Once the software selection is done, it’s now the implementation. During the implementation phase, all the basic requirements have to be studied and properly integrated into the software solution. Vijay Software’s work model works best with our on-site consultants that act as the intermediary between the client and our software team. They review the customer requirements and after a careful analysis prepare a proposal and work estimate, to be reviewed and approved by the customer before proceeding to the implementation phase. This work process prevents last minute changes of the project and resultant cost overruns.

The on-site consultant also manages the customer expectation, overall project, milestones, and deliverables. To deliver a solution that is on time, on budget and meets the current customer need with future expandability planned in advance.

During development of a custom or off the shelf solution, each need testing to ensure that what is being built or delivered meets the customer needs. As part of our solution, our QA department is involved with each project that is delivered to our customers. To test each scenario and deliver a well-tested solution to our customers.

Whatever your need, from responsive websites, e-commerce solutions, social applications, IOS/Android and Windows mobile applications, custom programming …. an on-site consultant can help you find and deliver the solution that fits your needs.

Need some help, let us know. We would be happy to help you with your needs.

Smartphone Application Development Using Phonegap

Praveen A — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 07:03:32 +0000

If you are looking for a full fledged framework to create Smartphone Apps in a very short time, Phonegap is the answer. This intuitive framework that could turn a seasoned web developer to an app developer by harnessing their existing web development knowledge. It makes development effort a lot easier by drastically reducing the development time and cost. It’s the best development approach as far as developing an app that compliments a web site or web application.

Recently Phonegap emerged as a powerful framework that brings lot of power to the hands of developers to build powerful apps in a comparatively less time than building device native apps.

How does it work?

The Phonegap framework will act as a wrapper that translates the device native commands into a single Javascript file that can be easily linked to a HTML5 file to invoke from your app. Yes, the phonegap features a number of APIs that makes it really easy for one to implement device features into an app. To cite a basic example, the contacts stored in your device can be managed from your app using the corresponding API. Likewise, the geo-location feature enables you to integrate a full fledged map into your app.

Multi-Platform Deployment

Not yet convinced about using Phonegap for your next smartphone app? Let’s consider the biggest advantage of using Phonegap. It lets you to deploy your app simultaneously targeting multiple platforms that includes Apple, Android,Windows, Blackberry devices. Since the core remains web, it is easy to manage and release future versions.

Building User Interface

You can use Jquery mobile, which is a web framework to create pages in conformance with the smartphone app specification. Jquery mobile can handle different transition effects that are demanded by the app using CSS3 transitions. A Jquery mobile page can be a single page for the whole application or multiple pages loaded into the main interface. This framework lets the app to load HTML5 loaded faster inside the app applying different transition effects as chosen by the programmer.

To conclude, the strategy is to go for Phonegap if you are developing an app for a web site or web application. But if you are looking at a more dynamic development such as required for games, I recommend using the native coding that offers greater performance. There are large number of applications built with this amazing framework. You can browse these apps here.