urbien

urbini

JavaScript2013–2013

urbien / urbini · Archived

urbini

Urbini ideas are now part of Tradle https://github.com/tradle, see also

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2Distinct people

7Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

29GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Urbini ideas are now part of Tradle https://github.com/tradle, see also

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-03-05 18:06:50 UTC to 2013-04-18 16:43:40 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Mar 4	2013-03-04 00:00:00 UTC	2013-03-11 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
Mar 11	2013-03-11 00:00:00 UTC	2013-03-18 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 18	2013-03-18 00:00:00 UTC	2013-03-25 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 25	2013-03-25 00:00:00 UTC	2013-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Apr 1	2013-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2013-04-08 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Apr 8	2013-04-08 00:00:00 UTC	2013-04-15 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 15	2013-04-15 00:00:00 UTC	2013-04-22 00:00:00 UTC	3	3

What Hacker News says

7 sources

datadiver·Apr 18, 2013

Too bad, as Linkedin did an amazing job optimizing their HTML5 app. See my discussion with their project lead on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552634 There is a ton of tricks LinkedIn employed to optimize their webapp. Check out their blog for a ton of ideas: http://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/ What I think they failed at, is not releasing their code open source. Then the community would have helped them find the memory leaks and other edge cases. So I consider it a call to arms, let's build an amazing mobile web client that employs all those tricks, things that only big companies like LinkedIn could afford to make, and better. We could turn this into a distro for JavaScript/HTML5 apps. I and my friends have started this work. Join us on github at http://github.com/urbien/urbini

In Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

datadiver·Apr 17, 2013

@trunab I watched this great video and made a transcript of it: http://urbien.com/v/Blog/32272?-ref=Urbien%2F32034 Keep in mind this is my personal take, not the exact words of the presenters. I was mostly interested in understanding how we can improve http://github.com/urbien/urbini Our target audience is geeks who can't code. So it is upon us to make their HTML5 mobile apps perform. @trunalb, am I right that this was you on stage in the video's first part, and then answering questions? Is it possible to share the code that avoids highlighting list items during scrolling? We have this exact problem.

In Techniques for smooth infinite scrolling in HTML5

datadiver·Apr 15, 2013

true, infinite scrolling and footer do not work together, unless footer is position:fixed, which is often the case on mobile. Infinite scrolling is pretty much the norm on mobile and is increasingly popular on desktop, pinterest and twitter are examples. I have found only a couple of libraries that attempt some of the techniques used by LinkedIn team. One is [infinity.js](http://airbnb.github.io/infinity/) by airbnb but it is specific to pinterest-style masonry layouts, and another is [swipeview.js](http://cubiq.org/swipeview) by Matteo Spinelli, the great guy who created iscroll.js. We are using swipeview in [Urbini](http://github.com/urbien/urbini) but it is not good enough, scrolling is terribly slow. It is possible that it is some problem in interaction between jquery mobile and swipeview, so we are investigating it, but anyway swipev

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iew is not even close to what LinkedIn guys have created. I know Sencha guys have a similar technique, [Infinite List Component](www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story) but we do not want to use Sencha as it has terrible cross-browser support compared to JQM.

In Techniques for smooth infinite scrolling in HTML5

datadiver·Apr 1, 2013

It is sad that after 20 years of MVC and the 10 years of it on the Web, we are still telling people that to start coding they need to start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And I agree with you, this is the place to start today. Yet it is pathetic, that is unless we want to keep the coding just to ourselves, like the doctors do with their field. I recently listened to a presentation on Grails. Honestly wanted to grok it fast. Mind you, I have been a Java developer since it first came out around 1996. No disrespect to the framework itself, but all those extra concepts you need to shove into your head before you even begin to code, this is atrocious. Out of this resentment I and a couple friends set out to build an MVC system where newbies start with the models (backbone.js) by creating them on a smartphone using only their browser. And once

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you are done, the app goes live. See it at http://urbien.com and its open sourced client at http://github.com/urbien/urbini Laying out the main concepts of your future app, and connecting them is not easy for noobs. Hack, even for developers sometimes it is a bit of a puzzle. You need to scratch your head a couple of times when you make the domain model for a new app. But at least this is all you need to do to get the app running with our system. Afterwards you can start tinkering and tweaking, by changing themes, images, modifying the underlying templates (HTML) in-place, and connecting apps IFTTT-style, with a tiny plug script. Would you like to review and may be even help us make the design friendly to geeks-who-can't-code?

In Want to Learn to Code? Start Small and Have Fun

tenaciousmv·Mar 31, 2013

We need you guys! Quick summary of our start-up: Urbien lets you (devs and their grandmas) build/fork/re-skin/connect apps that live and play together in an app network with direct data-sharing (no APIs), all from a smartphone. Semi-quick summary: At Urbien we implemented MVC with a generic view and controller, so that devs only need to write models. We then created a UI for model creation that runs on smartphones. Our goal is to simplify mobile web app creation to the point where complete noobs can start easy and learn gradually. The danger with such frameworks-for-noobs is that eventually you hit a wall. We try hard to avoid that: you can replace any template in-place, soon you will be able to replace views and all other assets of the application. If you want to get involved, we are chronically understaffed, over-ambitious, and really

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really really good-looking. We have tons of interesting projects, and/or you can design your own project, seeing as you're working for free. In fact, we're not profitable yet so you don't have to worry about forced compensation. Email me and let's set up a Skype session? Our rapidly evolving open source mobile client (JS): http://github.com/urbien/urbini

In Proposition Bet: I'll work on your startup for free

datadiver·Mar 5, 2013

As mentioned by other posters, Rails, Grails and Django all do the job to a certain extend, the hardest part being to gen the UI that is generic enough, yet flexible. Man, hard is not the right word, it is insanely difficult to achieve this goal. That said, this is what our team set out to do. We just released on github the full client for a new type of CRUD app generator http://github.com/urbien/urbini focused on mobile web apps. Cloud backend is not open source, but is free to use. Developer creates a Model in Web UI on the phone, tablet or a modern desktop browser, and the app prototype is done. Backbone.js models are generated and are sent to the browser when you point it to your app. Model definitions, templates, views, css, images are saved to appcache and LocalStorage and the data for models are saved to IndexedDB/WebSQL and are au

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tomatically synced with the server in background via CRUD. Is that what you had in mind?

In Ask HN: Why not build CRUD app generators and be done with it?

datadiver·Mar 5, 2013

1. for debugging minified JS we tried to use source maps, but they were not supported (I have to say that Chrome claims to support it but it is working intermittently). So our fallback today is to serve non-minified to developers (based on a cookie) and minified to the rest of the world. The drawback is that users may report JS exceptions with the line numbers which are different from what developers would see. 2. for mobile I need FF to let my webaps compete with native apps. Mozilla is changing the game on mobile with webapis to devices https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI, you guys are the saviors! We have been waiting for the ability to write device interfacing webapps since 2008! Our team is on the way with an MVC framework that utilizes device webapis, see http://github.com/urbien/urbini. But one critical thing is missing - Firefox need

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s to start as a service on device boot, and webapps should be able to register JS callbacks in this service. It does not need to include a rendering engine, but webapp should be able to spawn full browser. Without this we can't write proximity-based social apps, a bump-like app for business cards, network aware db sync engine, etc. To continue this line of thinking, it is not always devices that you need your webapp to communicate with. Sometimes it is Android intents. Like the intents defined by pebble watch service http://developer.getpebble.com/ What would be cool is to have a generic interface to those intents in Javascript. I know it is Android-specific, and iOS will need another solution. The idea I want to throw on a table is to define any interactions with native code as Models in MVC. Our team is prototyping such for Pebble smart watch right now http://urbien.com/app/Pebble. I am available for brainstorming if you want to take it further.

In Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?