Suppose I want to write an app for Android OS that is not going to be a real-time game; that is, it will be a turn based game (requiring internet access) that is based on forms and pages.
I’d like to use HTML5 to do this, and simply have a WebView on the native app with some bindings to the website’s javascript, etc. for more functionality (if needed). Of course, since this is not a realtime game, performance doesn’t seem like it would be an issue.
The only real reason I can think of to not use HTML5, is because there would be loading times in between forms e.g. every time a user clicks on a button to perform an action that transitions them to a new form, which is actually a new web page, that web page must be loaded. If I did this natively using the Android SDK, the loading of the forms would be seamless and instantaneous (even though the web up/down will take a small amount of time, but that is expected).
Is this a real issue? Are there ways around it that don’t involve using the Android SDK instead of HTML5?
A couple of ideas:
1) Bundle your HTML with the app in the folder called assets and load it from there with an URL like file:///android_asset/your_path.html. This will reduce the time required to load because the content will be on the device.
However, beware of the following webview bug in Android 3.0+ that causes any URL with # or ? to fail to load from the assets folder:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=17535
2) You can also choose to use AJAX to reduce the page load time. You load the heavy libraries once in the beginning and then use AJAX for subsequent page loads to avoid loading a lot of JS stuff. But beware of the bug above, since AJAX page loads use # in the URL.