Custom Apps

Basic apps generally display information in simple, well-defined formats and provide simple types of interactions. In some cases, this may not be sufficient to meet your requirements. MashZone NextGen developers can handle more complex requirements with:

Customized views/customized basic apps. These are views you have added to a mashable or mashup using the MashZone NextGen built-in views or pluggable views to which you choose to apply more advanced customizations. This simplifies development for complex requirements, updating the look of built-in or plug-in views and optionally adding custom interactions.

See Customized Basic Apps and Views for more information on the types of customizations possible.

Fully custom apps are apps that MashZone NextGen developers create from scratch. This is more complicated as developers must produce all the resources for the view and interactions. But fully custom apps allow you to handle more complex presentation requirements or more specific interactions that are not possible by other means.

To customize the presentation and/or behavior for views, you add one or more views to a basic app and customize the app. This uses the App Specification, app.xml, for the basic app which you edit in the App Editor.

First, follow the basic procedure to Customize a Basic App or View. Then use these techniques, as needed:

Customize Themes for Basic Apps and Views to have two or more views share a common look and color scheme.

Note: Additional, advanced customizations are possible for the Grid and KPI View, the Template View and almost all of the built-in chart views. Examples for advanced customization techniques are coming soon to the Software AG Tech Community for MashZone NextGen at http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/communities/public/apama/products/presto/downloads.

Fully custom apps let developers handle more complex presentation requirements or interactions that are not possible with basic apps, even through customization. Custom apps also allow developers to meet look and feel standards for your organization.

Note: The examples of custom apps in the topics in this section are generally designed as desktop apps. Most of the techniques shown, however, apply to desktop or mobile apps.

See Custom Mobile App Requirements for more information on developing custom mobile apps for MashZone NextGen.

In some cases, you can design and add a pluggable view instead creating a custom app. See Creating Pluggable Views or Libraries for more information.

With custom apps, you start from a minimal package in the App Editor that contains stub files for the various resources used in an app. You work with these resources, testing as you go. Once the custom app is working, you can also download this final package to check this into your source control tools if needed. See Create Custom Apps from the Base App Package for basic instructions.

For examples and specific techniques you may use to create custom apps, see:

In addition to common resources such as HTML pages and JavaScript libraries, fully custom apps also have an App Specification, app.xml, that defines all the resources in the app, properties and other information about the app. For more information on App Specs and the elements you can use, see App Specification Reference.

For additional information, see the MashZone NextGen App API Reference, The Structure of a MashZone NextGen App, App Packages and App Files and Parameters for App URLs.

Most of the development requirements for custom mobile apps are the same as custom desktop apps. MashZone NextGen mobile apps are HTML5 web applications with JavaScript and CSS to make them compatible with most modern mobile devices. There are only two mobile-specific requirements for custom apps:

Use a mobile-compatible JavaScript library, such as jQuery Mobile, to allow the custom app to recognize and respond appropriately to gestures and orientation changes.

Add mobile-compatible flags to the App Specification for the types of devices the app supports. See <presto-meta> for more information.

Once you have created a custom mobile app and uploaded it to MashZone NextGen, you must publish it to the AppDepot to enable mobile users to find and use it in MashZone NextGen Mobile.