Question

I have made a web application that administrate questions for a quiz. The web content is divided into two pieces; One administrating part, and one public part. These interfaces are made for desktop web browsers.

Now, I want mobile devices to be able to browse these questions (with the look and feel of an application).

So I thought of two ways I could do it; Just add another folder in the webcontent named mobile make a custom interface for mobile phones and just add a webview with that URL in Android/iOS etc.

Or, make a Web Service using REST and make a new web application that is interdependent of the question project and act just as a client of it using the REST services.

Does one of the approaches above seem reasonable, or are there other better ways of doing it?

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Update
This is a project made with EJB and JSF. Should I just add a folder in the JSF project and point mobile phones to that?

Answer 1

This is typical MVC application where you need to have two type of views

1. HTMl view for your browser based clients
2. XML view for Mobile applications (achievable by REST as you mentioned).

I would suggest to have a native mobile application which would talk to the web server via REST APIs.

Not sure which framework you are using here but most of the MVC framework will allow you to create XML views (Please check struts2 rest plugin)

Now the overall idea/design should be :

• The web controllers/Actions talk to delegates
• The delegates in turn talk to DAOs
• DAOs talk to Database.

You will have different controllers for different end users (html for browsers/xml mobile)