Easiest way to turn a mobile app into a website?

kevbam

We are growing company that develops decision support mobile software. We have chosen the mobile first route. We are now getting requests to make our software available on browsers(chrome, IE, Firefox). Is there any easy way to make an iOS or Windows 8 app into a website? The iOS app is native and the windows 8 was built using (xaml, C#). I am aware of solutions such as app.io, however I am not sure this would be user friendly for day-to-day use. We are looking for something that would give us a user friendly end product like this - carmacarpool.com/desktop/, without having to start from scratch. Is there any service or way to this do quickly?

colm_c

The short answer -- no.

The long answer, if your app was HTML5 this could work, but then you'd have to deal with all the issues of HTML5 in an app.

bpmurray

Probably starting from the XAML/C# point is the easiest (although not easy). Have you considered rewriting in DHTML, and creating mobile apps using something like Phonegap? It's the inverse of what you've done, but if you have good responsive code, you can make the markup behave well on browsers and on mopilde devices.

kevbam

Thank you both for your responses, seems like there is no easy answer to this one.

The Corinthian

There is no easy answer, because another factor is how modularized is your existing code? Specifically, how separate is your UI and database code from the rest of your business logic?

If it is at least reasonably separate, then it could be done relatively painlessly as a dotNet Web site. By relatively, I mean that you would need to redo your UI from scratch (graphical assets would not need to be reinvented, but they still would have to be optimised for Web rather than mobile) and any database (or code to access data from a server) code would have to be amended to work with a different database setup, but your business logic could literally be transported to a server with little or no amendment.

ChRoMe

The Corinthian wrote: »

There is no easy answer, because another factor is how modularized is your existing code? Specifically, how separate is your UI and database code from the rest of your business logic?

If it is at least reasonably separate, then it could be done relatively painlessly as a dotNet Web site. By relatively, I mean that you would need to redo your UI from scratch (graphical assets would not need to be reinvented, but they still would have to be optimised for Web rather than mobile) and any database (or code to access data from a server) code would have to be amended to work with a different database setup, but your business logic could literally be transported to a server with little or no amendment.

Yeah this, considering the Windows 8 application will be written in C sharp, converting it in to a ASP.NET site would be the best approach.

Talisman

How modular is the code base? If you can detach the UI then you can expose the business logic as a web service.

Building an interface to the web service could be achieved using a JavaScript framework such as Angular, Backbone, Dojo, Ember, Knockout, Sencha Ext JS, or YUI. There are plenty of others but those are probably the most commonly used.