Tired brain requires 21st century reboot into javascript - please help

[Adrian Essex]

I've been working my way through the very excellent Phonegap tutorial by Christophe Coenraets and I've covered parts [1 - 9]. In fact I've managed to get a little bit beyond that and made some adaptations to suit my particular application. I want an ios and android app that will read a barcode or provide an alpha lookup for club members arriving at a club training session. Coenraets' app looks up employees - a very good start. The changes I have managed to make are

1) change the data store so that it stores club members not employees

2) change the alpha look up so that it shows a membership expiry date and the member id

3) change the code so that it refers to 'members' not 'employees'

But there I get stuck. the additions I want to make are:

a) look up by membership id, either by typing in the number or via the smartphone camera's reading a barcode

b) flag up a warning if a membership is out of date

c) write away the record of the member's visit

The problem is my tired old brain is firmly stuck in 1980s Cobol, a straightforward procedural language. It struggles with asynchronous processing, objects and methods. I have learned a lot about javascript, and it may be that by packing in lots of debugging tools and displaying almost everything on the console, I may get quite a lot further. But I wouldn't half appreciate a bit of help. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

If you can help please contact [e-mail]. 

[Chris Setz]

Don't think you need a native app - could be better to move the logic to the web and use a 'thin' client.

Almost every phone is sensitive to QR codes - Google Goggles etc will do it for you Adrian - just add parameters to a QR code to get the data in - bar codes are so 1999... It's quite difficult to get users to download new apps...

When the phone reads the QR code, it lets the user choose to click on the URL, so you can have one like adrian.com/members?mycode=123

That goes to a webpage which displays the result:

member 123 due to expire in 6 days.

So it's the web application that has the logic - they're easier to write and maintain and intrinsically cross-platform.

I did a few local posters (Photoshop runs javascript btw) that generated a unique QR code for each poster and then printed them out. The hope was that I would find out which of those put around Crouch End attracted the most 'scans'.  Didn't need an app to go with them, the users obviously all had qr code scanners already on their phones and this system passed them to my local website painlessly.

Plenty more advice and suggestions if you want them - I really like talking about ideas and approaches most.

p.s. You do know that Phonegap got supplanted by Apache Cordova some time ago, don't you?

pps. If you must, here's a complete, solid, open source barcode app: https://github.com/zxing/zxing/