SyncFocus on Mobile – Alloys are extra

Which Essex boy doesn’t want Titanium Alloys?
Photo © Maxpro Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

Introduction to Appcelerator

I’ve had my eye on Appcelerator and their Titanium mobile development platform product for some time. So I grabbed the opportunity to venture north of the [Suffolk] border to the ”SyncFocus“ a SyncNorwich spin-off event that was held in the Garden House Pub, upstairs room, in Norwich last night (20th March).  So, reflecting on my rough notes, I’m posting this blog with a few random thoughts thrown in and some links to further information for those interested in javascript-based mobile developments.

This SyncFocus featured as guest speaker non other than Boydlee.  For those who haven’t heard of Boydlee, he is a mobile application development guru and specialises in the Titanium platform who, like Beyoncé, is now so famous he doesn’t need to use his surname .

My “executive summary” is that Titanium is a serious productivity tool for people who can write “well written” javascript code. It is in competition with the HTML5-based approach of PhoneGap, and does not (yet) have as many surrounding services as IBM Worklight which is squarely aimed at the big Enterprise market and is not as broad in its coverage of operating systems and devices (yet). It does however, have a thriving developer community and a very attractively priced (i.e. “FREE” cloud service). It does appear to be very easy for a moderately skilled javascript developer to create apps but it’s probably just as easy to create a horrendous mess so the newest approach is to supply a framework as the well-known MVC pattern through “Alloys” – which Essex boy doesn’t want Titanium Alloys on their racer?

Main points:

• Titanium is purely JavaScript library coding against the Titanium api, the platform compiles the source to native Objective-C or Java code for the iOS and Android Apps and can easily be linked with the Xcode or Android SDK to complete the builds.
• Links with emulators for iPhone, iPad and Android
• Appcelerator has over 400,000 registered developers worldwide (a counter on their home page tells me it is just under 430,000 today)
• The libraries themselves are “Free and open source”, available on GitHub
• However, the Titanium studio is not free, and you can take the Appcelerator Paid support
• An estimated one third of cross- platform apps are built on titanium
• Claims to also support BlackBerry 10, but Windows 8 is not available until later this year

One really nice feature is a very large “Module marketplace” which is mostly compiled binary code aimed at one native operating system or the other that can be downloaded and incorporated into the build – for example something to integrate to native libraries, plugins, e.g. Barcode scanning

A lot of those modules also have their source code on GitHub, building the community even more and improving the eco-system. This appears to be thriving and also includes some javascript extensions as well as the compiled native iOS and Android libs.

Appcelerator Mobile Service (ACS)

ACS is an interesting move to give a free level of Mobile (application) Back-end as a Service (MBaaS) to developers of services, running on AWS.

This includes 20GB storage, 5m push, 5m api and 20 pre built common services, including key-value pairs (similar to AWS Simple DB), Ratings, Geo services, media, including thumbnails, Social integration (Facebook) and storage of custom objects, which I think was based on Mongo DB as a service. There is certainly capability to link directly with Node and Mongo backends and simple stuff like SMTP integration (again similar to AWS’s Simple Email Service “SES”).

Coding practices

Boydlee recommended looking into Common.js best practice for relative newbies to Javascript. Other frameworks are available, like backbone, require.js and one of his blog posts has recommended the javascript patterns book by Stoyan Stefanov.

There are also free books online available on styling, including best practices to cascade for tablets so you don’t just get an enlarged phone experience that sucks.

The CSS approach also over-rides for different devices, so it’s not always best to stick with pure javascript for everything, however, for those who really are blinkered by javascript there is a CSS to JSON converter library.

Boydlee’s books are on PACKT or there are kindle versions. Boydlee’s best practices book is one I will be getting for sure.

Finally, the newest developments in Appcelerator will probably be using Alloy which includes full Model View Controller (MVC) frameworks (again, all built on well-known javascript frameworks) that claims to speed up App development by another order of magnitude.

Comparing it with the IBM Mobile First offering the coverage of mobile O/S is much wider in Worklight (Windows 8 and BB 10 were available very soon after launch), the adaptor environment, the upgrade management and enterprise app centre seem more developed and you have the whole extra wrappers of security, analytics and so on within IBM’s Mobile offering. The customer list on Appcelerator’s website is mighty impressive for consumer-oriented Apps but the ability to integrate with Enterprise back-ends is less of a focus, which is why in our case we’re focusing on IBM for Enterprise mobility but Appcelerator is certainly worth considering.

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Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit – now it’s getting personal

Ant Allan speaking at 2013 Gartner IAM Summit, London.
Photo by David Taylor

In the life of an IT professional you end up learning a good deal of information relevant to your profession, at seminars and conferences. When those conferences deal with security, as the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit 2013 in London near Westminster last week did, then you will often take away lessons for your personal life too.

So when Jeffrey Robinson (@WritingFactory) told us in the closing keynote that 100% of us would be subject to an electronic fraud attack over the course of the next year – multiple times… he was underlining a theme that had been running through the sessions over the two fully-packed days.

Hacking and cyber attacks are no longer (and have not been for a while) a form of entertainment for script kiddies to boast about pwn’ing your server, or workstation… they are big business with plenty of resources.

Peter Armstrong, Identity Assurance Tech Director at CESG, had underlined this on Monday (11 March, 4.15pm), in his session “How to Attack an Online Service“, when he explained that part of the Ice IX attack (fuller explanation by John Leyden in The Register, 02 Feb 2012) involves setting up a call centre and diverting your house phone there, so that when the bank calls to verify the suspicious transactions that start appearing. The call centre has enough people to find someone of the same sex, age and regional accent to pretend to be you; and then using a screen with all the harvested details from your hard-disk previously to be able to answer questions about your favourite football team, pet dog, music and film tastes, mother’s maiden name…   et voila !

Criminals no longer bother to rob banks directly, as consumers are much softer targets, and the risks are much lower. Cyber criminals are very unlikely to even see the inside of a courtroom, let alone the inside of a prison; and the rewards are high. Cyber crime is just not going to go away. It is an arms race.

And on the mobile front it is pretty one-sided. Apparently 30% of mobiles have malware on them, with Android being a favourite, Symbian, and even (surprisingly) BlackBerry.

Search the net for ZitMo for one of the big examples.

There are even trojans turning up in the curated app stores. The numbers in the un-curated stores for hacked and rooted hardware must be frightening. The one major defence against having all your passwords (good or bad, weak or strong) harvested by key-loggers on your desk-top/lap-top is good hygiene. There are even viruses which download to your android’s storage, and then infect your PC when you next sync, or mount it as a mass storage device.

All this raises big questions about the suitability of the Bring You Own Device (BYOD) model.

Various exhibitors showcased Mobile Device Management (MDM) products, and walled gardens… and there are various strategies for securing applications in themselves, but most mechanisms that do not classify the device as “totally untrusted” rely on the underlying OS not being compromised. Would a firm be expected to support a rooted device in addition to a stock device? Is it easy to keep corporate data safe, even in “totally untrusted” mode?

So as well as the professional angle of what I do, the IAM conference got me thinking about my own digital safety, in addition to the business application of digital safety.

Many thanks to our partners, ForgeRock, for inviting me along. It was good to get to know more of their excellent team there too.

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It’s time to get groovy when building android projects

Photo: Old record player by Grafphotogpaher (c) Dreamstime Stock Free Images

Those of you accustomed to developing android application will be familiar with the mechanism used for building android apps, such as having the IDE do the work for you, which is somewhat limited, or breaking out and writing ant scripts to orchestrate a build. Some of the adventurous amongst you may be using the maven-android-plugin.

It appears that the Google Android build tools team has come to terms with the fact that ant probably isn’t the best option these days, and are moving towards replacing ant with gradle in the SDK in the future.

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend a Meetup.com event with the London Android Group (@londroid) at the SkillsMatter (@skillsmatter) HQ, where Hans Dockter (@hans_d), the CEO of gradleware gave a presentation on what gradle is, and how it can be used for building android projects, enabling developers to manage their builds with groovy based scripts rather than XML.

What is a build framework anyway?

As Hans put it so well, in short, a build framework will “compile stuff, copy things around, and drop out an archive“.

Whats so limiting with the current options?

Ant can be considered imperative, simply meaning that you have to spoon feed it with instructions via tasks; compile these files that reside here, copy them to this directory, jar it up etc, its not really capable of figuring things out for itself.

Maven on the other hand is considered declarative, meaning that you can focus more on the outputs of a task, such as “I want a web application”, providing you have your source in the right place, maven is smart enough to figure out where to find it, how to compile it, and what the output for a web application should look like. Essentially you tell maven what the inputs are, and what you expect to get out of it, and maven figures out the bit inbetween, thus avoiding the need for scripting tasks as you would have to if using ant.

Sounds great, so what does gradle bring to the android party?

Free beer! If only…but we get the next best thing.

Gradle attempts to take the best parts of ant and maven, by using it for building your android projects you can benefit from:

• Very light and easy to manage build files, no trawling through humungous XML files. (gradle vs maven).
• Gradle follows convention over configuration like maven. It knows where your source is for a java project (unless you decide to override it), you can read more about convention over configuration here.
• Flexible dependency management, integrate with existing maven/ivy repositories. Different versions of dependencies for different build tasks? No problem.
• It gives you the freedom and flexibility to define your own custom behaviour without needing to write plugins as you would if using maven. Groovy is your friend here.
• Support for multiple projects. You don’t need to have separate projects for production code and integration tests, you can have keep them within the same project and define different source sets. This greatly reduces parent/child projects that can be a chore to maintain.
• Don’t have gradle installed? Can’t install gradle easily? No worries, there is gradle wrapper for that. This is particularly useful on CloudBees Jenkins environments where you don’t have access to install gradle directly.
• You have a free and paid for version of the app, with some common shared library between them? Gradle handles this perfectly via product flavours
• In addition to free and paid for flavours, you also have builds for different architectures such as ARM and x86? Flavour groups will help you there.
• You’re not tied to an IDE, the build scripts should be IDE independent so your team can choose their own flavour of IDE, or build from the command line as you would on a jenkins environment.
• Don’t want to use Eclipse, prefer IntelliJ instead? No worries, apply the idea plugin and run gradle cleanIdea idea. Boom, idea project is setup and ready to go, no messing around with project settings.
• Easily run instrumentation tests on multiple virtual devices, no need for manual testing each time you make a change.

Getting started?

1. Watch the presentation
2. Read through the android build tools page, plenty of information here on how to use the android gradle plugin
3. Have a read of the gradle documentation, its very well documented.
4. Checkout the samples on github
5. Have a browse of the groovy documentation so you can understand the basic syntax of the language.
6. code, code, code!

Make sure you join the London Android group on meetup.com and look out for future events like this, they’re free and well worth the train ticket. For those in the south east, be sure to checkout SyncIpswich and SyncNorwich for free technology meetups.

 

IBM Worklight, making light-work of app development in the enterprise

Having recently spent time working on the IBM Worklight platform, I thought it would only be fair if I documented some of my findings. No disrespect to the IBM’ers, but its reasonably fair to say that documentation is a little sparse in places, so lets give a little back to the community by discussing some of the hurdles. Lets not dwell on what Worklight is, Andy has already covered this well in a previous post; but lets just dive right into some of the technical aspects.

General Thoughts

Development on the whole is a relatively straightforward process, even for someone like myself that often steers well clear of anything that involves web presentation technologies (it reminds me of dark nights at the university labs spending hours trying to get a button to align correctly, the night before coursework submission *shudder*).

The Worklight eclipse plugin provides a good drag & drop GUI builder, but with support only for dojo. I opted to drop dojo and go for jQuery. jQuery is very well documented, and is easy to get help should you require it. One of the main things I like about jQuery is its showcase and examples, they are documented very well and the learning curve is generally quite small, but also the themeroller, it becomes incredibly easy to customise the default colour scheme and drop the generated CSS into your app. It always amazes me how excited the marketing guys will get if you can add in the corporate colour scheme to your app (thanks Joseph!).

Continuous Integration

We’re big fans of CI here, so I was quite keen to understand how easy it would be to have our Worklight apps built from the command line, and ultimately on a Jenkins CI box. The chaps over at IBM have done a fantastic job of exposing an array of Ant tasks that help with building and deploying apps, you’ll almost certainly want to read through module 42 on the getting started page that covers these tasks:

• adapter-builder – Use this task to build your adapter and create the .adapter file
• adapter-deployer – Use this to deploy a .adapter file to a Worklight server (very  useful for deploying to a remote AWS instance)
• war-builder – Use this to build the server .war file that you will deploy to the application server (some manual tweaks are required)
• app-builder – Use this to build the .wlapp files that you will deploy into your Worklight container
• app-deployer – Use this to deploy your .wlapp files onto a Worklight server (useful again for remote deployments)

Lets have a closer look at each of those targets, and how we’re using them here at Smart421:

Getting the party started, with init

Firstly, grab the worklight ant jar (you’ll need to have purchased the WL Enterprise edition for this) and add it into your ant context like so :

<target name="init">
 <echo message="Loading ANT Tool"/>
 <taskdef resource="com/worklight/ant/defaults.properties">
 <classpath>
 <pathelement location="./build-config/worklight-ant.jar"/>
 </classpath>
 </taskdef>
 <property environment="env"/>
 </target>

Now you’re free to use the ant tasks anywhere in your build script.

Building & Deploying WL Adapters

You need to build each adapter individually, and then deploy each one. You can create the following ant targets to do that for you:

<target name="buildAdapters" depends="init">
 <echo message="Building all adapters"/>
 <adapter-builder
 folder="./adapters/TwitterAdapter"
 destinationfolder="./bin"/>
 <!-- Build your other adapters here, same as above-->
</target>

<target name="deployAdapters" depends="init">
 <property name="WLSERVERHOST" value="http://my_aws_ip_here:8080/SmartConf"/>
 <echo message="Deploying all adapters"/>
 <adapter-deployer
 worklightServerHost="${WLSERVERHOST}"
 deployable="./bin/TwitterAdapter.adapter"/>
 <!-- Deploy your other adapters here, same as above-->
</target>

Building the Server WAR

You can build the server war file using the war-builder task, as shown below. It is important to note however, that I needed to do some tweaking to the war file to avoid any post-installation configuration tasks. According to the Worklight forums, there doesn’t appear to be a way to include files in the WEB-INF when the war is created, which means that once you’ve expanded the war on the application server you’d need to manually replace the default web.xml and context.xml files (to set your datasources), this can be quite frustrating, so in true Blue Peter fashion, I’m updating the war file with files I created earlier.

<target name="warBuilder" depends="init">
 <echo message="Building the war file"/>
 <war-builder
 projectfolder="./"
 destinationfolder="./bin"
 warfile="./bin/SmartConf.war"
 classesFolder="./bin/classes"/>
</target>

<target name="updateWar">
 <echo message="Updating the war file"/>
 <war destfile="./bin/SmartConf.war" update="true" webxml="./build-config/web.xml">
 <metainf dir="./build-config" includes="context.xml"/>
 </war>
</target>

Building & Deploying the WL Apps

You’ll also want to automate the building and deploying of the wlapp files, you can do this with the following :

<target name="buildApps">
 <echo message="Building all WL Apps"/>
 <app-builder
 applicationFolder="./apps/Smartconf"
 nativeProjectPrefix="SmartConf"
 outputfolder="./bin"/>
</target>

<target name="deployApps">
 <property name="WLSERVERHOST" value="http://my_aws_ip_here:8080/SmartConf"/>
 <echo message="Deploying all WL Apps"/>
 <app-deployer
 worklightServerHost="${WLSERVERHOST}"
 deployable="./bin/SmartConf-all.wlapp"/>
</target>

Building the Native Application Distributable Binaries You’ve survived this far, and I’m thankful to you for that, however we’re not quite finished yet. Worklight will generate the native projects for you, but its your own responsibility to take those project directories and build the Android APK, or the iOS IPA etc. IBM will draw the line at this point, so you need to build them yourself, you can do this for all of the environments quite easily using additional ant tasks, android is the easiest :

<target name="client-android" depends="buildAndroid">
 <!-- Run the android native build, in its own directory -->
 <ant antfile="./apps/SmartConf/android/native/build.xml" target="release" useNativeBasedir="true"/>
 <!-- Copy up the apk into the bin area, for consistency -->
 <copy file="./apps/SmartConf/android/native/bin/SmartConf-release-unsigned.apk" tofile="./bin/SmartConfSmartConfAndroid.apk" overwrite="true"/>
 </target>

Building Blackberry and iOS apps from the command line is slightly more involved, and I feel they warrant their own blog post on that, alternatively, get in touch and we’d be glad to offer some assistance. Bear in mind you will need an Apple MAC to build iOS, for which we’ve installed a shared box in our build environment.

Other Gotchas

As with taking on board any emerging technology, there will always be plenty of head-scratching moments where the documentation is thin, and Uncle Google doesn’t provide much help, fortunately for you, we’re a nice bunch of guys here at Smart421 so we’ll share some of the things that had us pondering over a coffee:

• The trailing “/” in the Worklight server host URL is required, don’t ask why, it just is.
• The versioning conventions for Worklight are a little strange, 5.0.0.270 = v5.0 GA, but the developer edition is 5.0.2.407-developer-edition = 5.0.0.3.
• If you have an existing 5.0.0.2 WL server installation, don’t upgrade it to 5.0.0.3, it fails to upgrade all components and leaves you with some obscure error messages that are hard to trace. The best plan of action is to uninstall, install again, but make sure you check for updates at time of installing, via the wizard
• App crashes with Unreachable host? When you build and deploy the app to your device, it has the WL server IP hardcoded into it. The next day when you arrive at the office and hop onto the Wifi, DHCP gives you a different IP address…It’s a classic schoolboy error, but catches us out from time to time. A simple solution if you don’t have a spare box lying around is to install the Worklight server on AWS and deploy to the cloud, bearing in mind that it needs to be open to your mobile devices over the Internet in a real-life installation anyway.
• Results is undefined on adapter call. A subtle difference here, HTTP adapters use invocationResult.results, whereas SQL adapters use invocationResults.result. That last character makes all the difference.
• Response cannot be parsed, please contact support; this is an annoying error that you often see in the developer preview, just make sure you set the body onload to WL.Client.init() as mentioned here.
• Unable to use geolocation services on android? You’re probably seeing Caught security exception registering for location updates from the system, this should only happen in DumpRenderTree. Make sure you have the geolocations permission in your android manifest as detailed here.

Conclusion

On the whole, I was very impressed with Worklight, they are offering a lot of functionality over and above the standard Cordova project. Some of the errors I’ve encountered have been a little frustrating, as often my only source of help was the forums, but I can accept that it is a product in its early stages of adoption, and will probably go very far. I’m looking forward to working with it in the future.

If you’d like to have a look at some of the apps we’re creating, or generally just want a chat about Worklight and some of its capabilities, or Mobility in general, we’d love to hear from you.

 

WebSphere User Group (WUG) UK. September 2012

Flooded
Photo by East Coast Main Line

I have had the luck to attend the WUG at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on George Street again this year. This is a bi-annual event hosted in Edinburgh in the Autumn and, from this year, at IBM’s facilities on the Southbank in London in the Spring.

The good luck was attending, when maybe a third of people failed to go when the weather was bad, but the bad luck was when the East Coast mainline was flooded on the way down, causing a very late return home.

There were a few interesting sessions, including the Worklight acquisition for developing mobile applications on to a variety of target devices, including iOS and Android. Possibly more on that later. There was also a good session by Alan Chambers on sample use-cases for using WebSphere eXtreme Scale, which is a distributed in-memory caching technology. This is an interesting area, which merits further attention. The slide deck for the various sessions, including ones I could not get to, are on the WUG site.

David Sayers of MidVision also gave a talk about DevOps, which is the set of disciplines for bringing development and operations closer to each other. Although MidVision supply a tool in this space, David was keen to stay away for instances of tools, and to say that there is no magic bullet, and that it’s about process and people too.

A phrase which struck a chord with me went something like: “many firms don’t want to make a change in a production system because ‘Steve’ is on holiday and he’s the only person who understands this”.

It’s a spooky coincidence, as we have just published a development policy stating that all environments, and deployments to those environments should be 100% automated, as part of our policy refresh.

The presentation I want to elaborate on a bit this time, is the “How Lightweight is the [WebSphere] Liberty Profile” which is part of WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 8.5.

Simon Maple  (Twitter @sjmaple) – one of IBM’s technical evangelists on WAS – explained that this profile is an OSGi-based application server kernel which only loads up the libraries and subsystems, as you need them. The end result is a *very* lightweight application server.

So much so, that the session involved showing the application server running on a Raspberry Pi (£20-odd computer, the size of the palm of your hand, delivered as a circuit board).

To follow this up Simon then started up a WAS instance on his older android phone which was then serving up a blogging application via the phone’s wireless hotspot. I connected to it with my phone, and posted: “Amazing!” (yes Oscar Wilde won’t be looking over his shoulder), which then showed up on his monitor, along with some more imaginative posts.

I have the tooling, which was provided on a memory key in our “info” shared area for any Smarties to download.

The liberty profile tooling (eclipse plugins) even runs on a Mac, along with the dev runtime. Even though this runtime is not supported in production on Mac, this is a pretty major step for IBM. I would not have imagined it five years ago.
In terms of production use though, the liberty profile WAS is still a standard WAS install from the perspective of licensing… though I’m not sure how many PVU’s a Raspberry Pi has.

IBM also have a new Head of WebSphere Software, Stuart Hemsley, who was keen to get feedback from the delegates, both by announcement at the keynote, and by walking around during the breaks.

Our feedback was that the application server just costs too much compared to the likes of Tomcat and JBoss, and includes technologies which are starting to be less relevant (e.g. session clustering), as the application architecture moves to pursue session-statelessness. Yes you would expect to pay a premium for a big-league vendor-supported product, but not 10x as much.

It would be a shame for IBM to loose out on market share because of pricing, when they provide excellent tooling and support, as shown by a session on performance tuning the JVM… but that (as they say) is another story.

 

DroidCon UK 2011: Two Smarties, and a whole bunch of freebies…

Last year I was lucky enough to attend the DroidCon Android conference in London, impressed by what I saw, I presented my case to return again for the second year, to scout out information on Android developments.

As usual, the format of the event is a 2 day barcamp, where various representatives from all areas of the industry present a topic which they feel strongly about, ranging from anything about UI design, design patterns, right through to commercials such as marketing and business considerations when releasing an application.

The first day consisted of informal discussions on various topics, I attended those mostly aimed at the developer (wasn’t too interested in gaming or the “boring” business talks).

I could drone on about each talk and what it covered, however it’s probably best that I just highlight some of the key talks and topics I found of interest:

Implementing analytics with AspectJ

Obviously one of the main drivers of putting an application to market is generate downloads, which, if priced correctly, will create revenue. However, being able to understand what users actually do with your application could enable you to target specific features even more, and produce even more downloads, revenue, and general happiness in the development team knowing their applications are doing well.

Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to track what users are doing in your applications? Being able to see which screens, features, or even which buttons are being used most in your application? The ability to know this information would allow you to back up business decisions, and enable product managers to decide and target upon new features.

Fortunately, the Google analytics framework is able to assist us with such issues, it can be integrated into applications and you can track events where you feel necessary. Additionally, the analytics API is also cross-platform compatible, so if you have iPhone and blackberry versions of your application, you can also track statistics there too.

To read more about this, you can access the slides from the presentation here.

Innovative UI with GreenDroid

I’ve developed a few android applications in my own time, both for hobbyist curiosity, and for Smart421s’ marketing curiosity (this one is yet to be published, watch this space!), and one of the things that takes a considerable chunk of development time, is designing and implementing the UI. Quite often, the application code is incredibly simple, sometimes even less than 50 lines, but arranging the UI into something remotely usable can often take double, if not more time than the original business logic for the application did.

Fortunately for us android developers, a pioneer named Cyril Mottier has forged an API from the depths of developer frustration to help, named GreenDroid. When developing UIs, its important to make the interface responsive, smooth, fast and polished, which can be somewhat an involving task if developing manually.

GreenDroid is a library, that can be included into your applications, which you can then depend on to create clean, attractive and accessible UIs easily, without having to manually design them in XML yourself. You can read more and see examples here : https://github.com/cyrilmottier/GreenDroid#readme

I can see a great many applications, and developers benefitting from this venture, particularly smaller scaled applications that are primarily interested in delivering functionality, without imposing corporate branding and color schemes across their application, however I wouldn’t be surprised if Cyril hasn’t already taken that into account and exposed some options for modifying color schemes and anything else to “brand” the UI.

I did try this on one of my applications that’s in development at the moment, it was incredibly easy to set up and use, if you’d like to see what this library can offer, checkout an application on the market called GDCatalog, Cyril released this as a showcase for the GreenDroid API.

Test Driving android with Robolectric

TDD is a development principle that most developers should consider, or at least be aware of. This is a practice that Smart421 actively pursue, so I was keen to see how this can be applied in the Android world.

Android applications are written in Java, however they don’t run on the standard JVM, but a mobile specific Dalvik VM, which can make standard unit testing somewhat frustrating, as the application code has to be built, the emulator started, application deployed and then started, that’s all before you can run a measly JUnit test. Fortunately for us developers, Robolectric saves the day.

Robolectric allows us to write simple JUnit test cases, against android components, which can be executed on the JVM, enabling a much faster TDD cycle. Robolectric works by intercepting android framework calls, and re-writing the method bodies, essentially allowing us to run a mocked android platform on the JVM for testing purposes.

Ultimately, Robolectric enables us to black box test, fastly, without need for mocking frameworks. I’m using Robolectric in two of my android applications and it has proven to be an easy to use API, and has helped me catch several potential issues, thus serving its intended purpose.

Other keynotes

I attended around 10 discussions over the 2 day period, here are some other talks that I found of interest.

Code reuse

Often, development teams want to release a trial, and a full (and often paid for) version of their application. Ultimately they would want to use the same code base for both versions of the application (you’d be crazy not to). There was a talk from the company TouchType on how they have implemented a build framework to disable or remove certain features from a build.

Mark Murphy’s predictions sure to go wrong

Whilst no one can predict the future precisely, Mark Murphy is quite the celebrity in the android world, so he’d be a reliable source to give us a steer in what may pan out in the future for the little green robot. Marks’ talk covered some of the things we may encounter, such as e-readers merging with tablets (which we’re already starting to see now, with the Kindle Fire), Amazon to be the #2 tablet maker (which we may also see now the budget Kindle Fire is on the way) and the inevitable introduction of ever more cross-platform technologies, hoping to obtain 100% cross-platform compatible apps, such as PhoneGap from Adobe, and pure HTML5. There will always be subtle differences in platforms and hardware, so these may prove slightly less forthcoming than hoped.

Hacking the android market for private betas

Currently, the android market doesn’t support betas, or private listings. However the devs over at LightBox have devised a way of “bending” the rules to cater for this.

Before they released their LightBox camera application, they ran a private beta on the android market, by publishing the app under an undisclosed name, locking all features, and requiring an authentication key to unlock the application. This enabled a select number of users to easily access the application, trial it, and provide feedback, without releasing the application to the wider market, for often preempted flaming from the general android community because it doesn’t play Super Mario, or because it’s not free.

I don’t know how legally correct, or even ethically correct this usage of the market is, but I found it an interesting topic of discussion.

Geeksphone

A startup from a young Spanish entrepreneur, to develop and market an android device, created by developers, for developers. The Geeksphone project is also intended to be community driven, whereby the users have a voice and direction in the development of future productions. Geeksphone do provide one unique feature, that I found rather appealing, that users are free to develop and create their own Android ROMs, submit these to Geeksphone where they will run their own in-house tests on it, and give it a seal of approval. Users can then use the ROM without voiding their warranty, and it is fully supported by Geeksphone from then on, quite an appealing promotion to users who intend to do slightly more than checking emails, and using Facebook on their devices.

To summarise, the conference was very informative and provided a wealth of information on all things happening in the android world. I’d certainly like to attend again next year, it would also be fantastic if we could muster up some Smart421 presence on site too….

All DroidCon seminars were recorded on video, and should be freely available here : http://skillsmatter.com/event/os-mobile-server/droidcon-2011