Wiki on Map: built with Mobincube, OpenStreetMaps, Wikipedia and Moback

Tips Aug 04, 2015
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Just 2 months ago we launched a brand new feature in Mobincube that allows you to add your own functionalities using HTML/JavaScript in local mode. Basically you can add your own HTML modules into your app and let them communicate with other parts the same app. For example, from your own module, you can invoke actions to access some other screens of your app, get some values from the device (location, os version, language, etc.), etc.

This new feature is great for developing advanced apps, like games, animations, user interaction, calculators, advanced forms, etc. But you don’t necessarilly need to display stuff, you can just use HTML modules to add points of decissions in your app, like open one menu or another depending on the language that the user has set in his device.

There are hundreds of SDKs out there that you can use to add amazing functionalities to your app. You can also use our partner Moback’s solution to have an easy to use server backend for your app, so you just worry about developing your app, not the server.

We want to share with you this app built with Mobincube as a good example of using this new feature:

Wiki map (for Android)

The core of this app is a web module developed in HTML/JavaScript. The first thing it does is asking the native side of the app for the device’s location. It uses OpenStreetMaps through the OpenLayer’s JavaScript SDK. There are some other map SDKs for JavaScript that you can use.

It also uses the Wikipedia API to retrieve articles. One cool thing about Wikipedia is that you can search for articles by entering a GPS location. So it is easy to place them on a map.

And finally, the app uses moback to store user sessions and mainly to store the articles that user mark as their favorites.

It’s a quite simple piece of code, just around 500 lines of code. And the result is quite good!

You can check the whole source code of this module:

https://github.com/ignacioroda/WikiMap

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