What is Jila?
Jila began as the core of Yawuru Ngan-ga, a language app from the Yawuru community of Broome, Western Australia. From there the team transformed it into an almost turnkey solution for communities wanting to create their own language applications without requiring a large financial outlay, or a team of developers to maintain the content.
The framework consists of two components, a cross-platform mobile application and a cloud-ready administration console.
Mobile (Click to Demo)
- Explore words and phrases by category or letter
- Learn the language through simple word, audio and picture games
- Access everything wherever you are, even offline
- Kickstart your experience with useful common phrases
- Search for words in the dictionary
Admin Console (Click to Demo)
- Manage your dictionary of terms, translations and categories
- Control what content is published to the app so you can release at your pace
- Upload images and audio to enrich entries
- User management to control who can manage your content
Who is behind Jila?
Jila is proudly brought to you by ThoughtWorks and the Yawuru community of Broome.
Who is using it?
The following apps were created using the Jila framework. Let us know if you are part of another.
How do I get involved?
It'll require a developer to get started, but the number of steps required to have your own app up and running is pretty short:
- Fork the repositories from GitHub HERE and HERE
- Customise the look and feel for your community or organisation
- Setup an account and bucket on Amazon S3 for storing images and audio
- Deploy the admin console to a hosting service like Heroku
- Populate the dictionary through the admin console
- Submit to the Apple and Google Play stores
- Share with your community and beyond!
If you make any enhancements or additions to the framework we'd really appreciate if you're able to submit them as pull requests. That way all of the communities building apps based on Jila can benefit collectively.
Are there any restrictions?
Not really, Jila is totally free to use. We chose the permissive MIT license to allow people to use the framework as they wish, making both free and commerical apps. This decision was made to encourage use of the framework and lower the barrier of entry for communities looking to build apps of their own.
How do I get in touch?
Twitter is probably easiest. The Jila team can be contacted at @jilaframework.
If email is more your thing, please contact us here.