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I'm trying to develop an ebook reader(for mobile devices) which is platform independent. Currently my focus is epub only. As a proof of concept, we were able to make a basic epub reader for android platform, using the functionalities provided by the platform itself(using webview, Xml Parser, Unzipper etc). But now we want to make it platform independent and we want to do it in C/C++. I know we have unzippers and xml parsers in C/C++, its the rendering part I'm worried about. My questions are...

1.How can I do the rendering, without using any of the inbuilt android views, so that it will work on other platforms also? 2.Is it better to stick to webkit for epub(the platforms which we're considering all have webkit)?

As of now I'm clueless. Any pointers on where to start?

BR, Rajeev

Rajeev
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  • do you target mobile client or pc ? keep in mind there are some fundamental constraints on each device category (other than the operating platform). sometimes "swiss army knife" software are just too inefficient to be practical. – YeenFei Sep 06 '10 at 06:10
  • We target mobile client. Even I am wondering about the same, whether it is practical to do so. Still, just for a proof of concept. – Rajeev Sep 06 '10 at 06:27
  • possible duplicate to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/51988/what-work-has-been-done-on-cross-platform-mobile-development – Markus Kull Sep 06 '10 at 06:29
  • I will look into that thread Markus. Thanks. – Rajeev Sep 06 '10 at 06:35
  • That thread talks about development frameworks for building cross-platform mobile apps. Something to look into for future development. But lets say on android itself, can I display the xmls without using the webviews/textviews etc(some third party rendernig engine)? I'm not sure how I can do this. – Rajeev Sep 06 '10 at 06:54

2 Answers2

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Most likely you will have to split your application into the cross-platform backend and a platform specific front-end.

If you want to implement indexing and searching of all e-pubs in your app, this could be part of the cross-platform part. If the epub reader contains a catalogue of downloaded/transferred epubs, the database including its access methods could probably be cross-platform as well (at least partially).

However, the presentation layer, i.e., the user interface, will probably have to be platform-specific. The best case scenario is that you can come up with an intermediate UI description language that can be automatically translated into Android / iPhone user interfaces. That is a daunting task however, and it's probably not even worth trying if you don't want to create many cross-platform apps.

Sebastian
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The only C/C++ development environment i found was MoSync.

Markus Kull
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