August 2013
PermaLink Quirks w/ Sencha Touch Hybrid App Development on BB10 w/ Sencha Architect08/25/2013
I've always been curious about how well Sencha Touch works on mobile devices (I found jQuery Mobile to be sluggish when its swiping code was added to Bootstrap's carousel code), so when Blackberry announced a program to try Sencha Architect and a BB10 device, I signed up for it thinking it'd be easy to port one of my simple Android apps to it.  It turns out quirks in Sencha Architect and the Blackberry packaging tools made it a lot more painful than it needed to be.


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PermaLink Building Android native clients for the Meteor.js framework08/03/2013
Today's mobile developers generally fall into the responsive-css-hybrid or native app camps.  On the one hand, the idea of a single web application that runs on the site and on mobile devices sounds great to the decision makers (and generally works for simpler apps).  Unfortunately, if you want the best experience for your mobile users (you generally won't find out about issues in hybrid apps until you're mostly done with it), you may very well need a native application as Facebook found out when they kept trying to use HTML5.

In choosing a web platform for your application's web site and as an endpoint for your mobile applications, one of the checklist items inevitably includes whether it's possible to write a pure native client that will talk to your web stack because decision makers like having insurance.  Meteor.js doesn't have the typical RESTful web service APIs that other web stacks have, though you can run another Node.js instance in parallel to do this with direct access to the database.  To provide the reactivity and realtime data sync that is Meteor.js' real strength, you have to talk to the server via the DDP websocket protocol.  For the two main mobile platforms (iOS and Android) as well as ASP.Net (including Windows Phones), this is now possible.



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PermaLink Using Gradle to build Android Library Eclipse projects08/01/2013 02:51
The Gradle build system was one of the most exciting things revealed at Google I/O this year if you're a developer.  The promise of getting rid of Ant/Maven XML config hell was a big juicy apple.  But then you find out that it only works well with Android Studio.  But Android Studio isn't stable or featured enough to use for development (no JUnit test support even).  So you go back to Eclipse and find the Gradle Eclipse plugin which mostly works except you have to invoke Gradle via a menu item.  But this doesn't work with Android Library or with Android App projects because you can't override Eclipse's build system (the main reason Google switched to IntelliJ/AndroidStudio is you can do this w/ IntelliJ).

But you still want to use Gradle and Groovy for your build scripts...



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About Ken
Full-stack developer (consultant) working with .Net, Java, Android, Javascript (jQuery, Meteor.js, AngularJS), Lotus Domino