Today I did some research on self-hosting apps. Basically, there's two types of apps: a web app and a packaged app.
Web apps are hosted by the developer on his/her own server, such that they are like mobile websites. For a more in-depth explanation, a YouTube video is provided here.
Packaged apps are installable, which is the main difference from a web app. It's similar to android in that you can simply download it on your phone and install it, which is exactly what we need in our situation.
Since we needed a packaged app, I began to read a tutorial on "Publishing Apps Yourself". While we could publish our apps to the marketplace, we're far from that, and since these are more... test applications, it's better to publish them by ourselves and self-host them. However, this is a bit of a complex process.
It starts off easy. First, you just .zip up your project folder. Then, it gets a bit more complex - you need to create a manifest file for your app. This manifest file is a bit smaller than the FirefoxOS manifest, but contains basic information about the app - developer name, website, app name, etc.
So far, so good. However, it's getting a bit complicated when I start looking around on how exactly to host my app. I'm thinking I'll host it on the students server, but I'm not exactly sure how it should be hosted, whether it should be zipped, or follow a specific file structure, etc. Tomorrow I'll look at this more in-depth and see how exactly I can approach this. Hopefully, we'll have a readily-packaged app by the end of the day tomorrow.
This doesn't look to bad to me. It is completely reasonable to require a manifest file, and it will be a great experience for you to learn how to write one, provided its structure isn't too complicated, which from your post it doesn't appear to be.
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