Writing Android Programs with HTML and JavaScript

Recently, I was assigned to work on a new Android project for a pollution enforcement agency. Basically, the project itself is a traditional web database program; the challenging part of this project is the requirements for its client side program: 

The client program runs on Android devices (Android smartphones with Android OS 2.3+). 
The client program needs to take pictures and upload them to the backend database.
The client program needs to read the barcodes on vendor's permits.
The client program needs to record GPS locations of pollution sites.
The client program needs to be easily deployed and maintained (20+ devices).

At beginning, the development team seemed to like to create an Android program from the scratches. However, most of the team members are web developers rather than Android programmers. The Android programming learning curve for some of them seems too steep. Also, the client program may be updated quite frequently, the deployment of a standalone Android program to 20+ devices may seem extra works for the project administrator.  

To resolve the above issues, the team decided (assigned me) to implement an Android specific web browser which can expose the lower level Android hardware features (camera, barcode scanner, GPS, ...) to the upper level web programmers through JavaScript interface. The web programmers can continue to use their favored HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and MySQL to complete the whole project.

After this project completed, I continued to refine some parts of my browser and wrapped it as a new Android program - "Togosoft Device Browser". In the rest of this article,  I will focus on "how to use the browser" rather than "how to implement the browser" (I may address this topic in another article). The following figure illustrates the basic features of the browser.  If anyone interests to learn it more, please visit http://www.togosoft.com/TDB for details.   

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