Advice Needed Urgently

Hi Kunal, I thought that might be the case well actually it would be iPad.

Also Kunal, could you provide a time estimate as to how long this app would take to create?

This sounds very generic "read barcodes then return an HTML page based on that barcode"

Are you saying you have these barcodes and pages? Or are you searching the web or something?

You need to research barcode reader frameworks or similar online.

If its all your data and info, its going to be faster to build. I don't know IOS yet, since I am learning Android, but you probably can render the html into a view or you will have to code the UI natively as well. Again I am not sure about that, you can research UI and Html for mobile separately from the reader part.

That sounds pretty reasonable.

I found this on barcode reading

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/838724/is-there-a-barcode-recognition-framework-for-ios

I don't want to say how to do the UI part since I don't know, but there probably is way to render in the views the html file you have into the screen.

I'm guessing you can keep the barcode long var in the table with the file name of the local file to render up. Then let the controller get the input from the barcode api, convert it, do a look up and send off the correct resource.

That's what you are planning to do right?

Pretty much yes, do you think a better angle to go from would be a responsive website?

Either way you gotta code the native part to capture the barcode. However that being said, you could just decode the # put it in a get request and then post the url to your responsive site and load the html in the browser.

You'll have to build an authentication mechanism as well if you need to keep this info private.

What you gain is a simpler coded app, and reusable service which Android devices can use.

If you want to build an app using PhoneGap which means you want to submit it the app store. Then HTML/CSS will suffice but if you want to use device functionality and retrieve information from a database then you need to know JavaScript. I didn't see you mention that you know JavaScript. You will need to store this data somewhere and I would recommend Parse. They have a good tutorial on how you can store data in the cloud and display it on a webpage: https://parse.com/tutorials/todo-app-with-javascript. Once you've built the app then you can package it up using PhoneGap. But you first need to focus on simply building the app. You will not get any specific tutorial to teach you exactly what you want. The Parse tutorial is your best bet. One last suggestion, you will not be retrieving an html page based on a barcode. You will simply retrieve data and display it on the webpage.

OK much appreciated. Could you estimate timescale?

And also can you please recommend a suitable open source barcode scanner?

Time scale is completely dependent on your skill and experience level. Only you can estimate how long something like this will take you to build. Sorry, I know it's not the answer you are looking for but I would create a list of features / functionality and all the steps it will take you to get there. Then I would associate a time estimation for each of those steps. That's how you can arrive at a time estimate.

PhoneGap has a barcode scanner plugin: http://phonegap.com/blog/build/barcodescanner-plugin/

Thanks, Amit, I appreciate your input!!

One last question...what approach would you take? native or phonegap (taking my experience into consideration)

Definitely PhoneGap but you already knew that ;)

It's a little specific but it's you should be able to do a WHERE clause on a barcode :)