Serial port, database connection and reporting in TideSDK

Question

I am thinking to migrate from .net to tidesdk as its cross platform. I want to use tideSDK in desktop app development. I have tried wxwidgets but didn't liked it too much. But tideSDK seems to adopt web standards such as html 5 and css3 which is beneficial as i know the technology well. But there are certain considerations to take before moving to new technology. So i have some questions as i dont know tidesdk.

1. Is there serialport library in tidesdk.
2. Can i connect to databases such as Mysql, Mongodb?
3. Is there any reporting and printing engine like crystal report, rdlc?

Answer 1

I'm in the very first phases of a project with the same requirements, and I'm considering the option of using nodejs to dialog via usb with my custom device, or using the original drivers to establish a socket stream from the serial port to nodejs and then straight in my application.

https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK-Examples/tree/master/NodeJS

There is no official way (as far as I know) of using well known reposting solutions, so I guess you'll have to improvise a little, but, since you are basically building webpages, you might consider using css directives for media="print" and experiment on that a little bit. Plus if you rely on node, you can give fluentreports a try, looks like a lot of fun :)

https://github.com/Nathanaela/fluentreports

Last but not least, yes, you can have your own local database, and you can maybe use it with node, like (I think) I'm going to do.

Answer 2

I have success using phantomjs and rasterize the html into pdf. fonts was a bit of an issue at first but I worked around it using svg fonts in my css.

phantomjs is a console binary but you can create a process from TideSDK and then pass in the arguments just like this:

p = Ti.Process.createProcess({
args: ['mycmd', 'arg1', 'arg2']
});

p.launch();