While working on PhoneGap Essentials, I got a chance to work with some mobile device platforms I’d not worked with before. I did some work with webOS, but as soon as I got ready to write the chapter on webOS development for PhoneGap, HP announced it was killing the platform and the PhoneGap team added support for Windows Phone development. So, I whacked the webOS chapter and cheerfully replaced it with one on Windows Phone.
Another interesting one is Samsung bada, a ‘newer’ OS supposedly getting some traction in Europe and Asia. I covered the OS in PhoneGap Essentials, but since then Samsung’s thrown their hat in with another mobile platform called Tizen (ww.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen). There’s been some talk of backwards compatibility for bada applications in Tizen, so you should be OK with what you know about PhoneGap and bada.
What I learned while working on the bada chapter of the book is that there isn’t any useful information about how to build PhoneGap applications on bada. Not in the PhoneGap download, not on the PhoneGap Google Groups forums, not on the PhoneGap wiki. I’m trying to work through this for the book so the information in the bada chapter is complete, but I thought I’d fill you in on some of the problems today – knowing that they’ll be addressed by the PhoneGap development team as soon as they can. I just wanted to make sure you had this information since I just can’t find real information anywhere.
First of all, the PhoneGap download located here: http://phonegap.com/download-thankyou doesn’t contain the code you need to build a bada application for PhoneGap. If you download the files from there and extract them on your hard drive then open the readme.md file in the bada folder, you will see something like this:{codecitation class="brush:text; gutter:false"}Steps to build a PhoneGap app ----------------------------- 1. Download Source Code (clone the repository) 2. Import in bada C++ IDE 3. Put your HTML/CSS files in the Res/ folder 4. Run phonegap.bat under Res/phonegap directory 5. Build&Run!{/codecitation}
What this is telling you is that even though there’s PhoneGap source code for creating bada applications in the download you just downloaded, you’ll have to go somewhere else to get the actual code you need. The instructions instruct you to import the sample bada project files into the bada IDE while the bada folder in the standard PhoneGap download doesn’t contain the project files. Instead of using the bada files from the PhoneGap download, you instead need to get them from the Apache Cordova (the latest name for PhoneGap) git repository here: https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-cordova-bada.git. Once you download and extract the files, you’ll have the files you need to import the bada PhoneGap project into the bada IDE.
Before you can run the program though, there’s one more step you have to complete and this isn’t documented anywhere either. Open Windows Explorer (the bada stuff only runs on Windows) and navigate to the bada source folder you extracted. Within the Res/phonegap folder is the phonegap.bat file highlighted in the following figure. You must execute that batch file to generate the phonegap.js file used by the sample application. I don’t understand why you have to take this extra step, there’s no reason I can think of that would prohibit the PhoneGap team from generating this file in advance, but it is what it is.
If you later make any changes to the JavaScript source files shown in the figure, you can just rerun the batch file to generate a new phonegap.js file from your modified source.
At this point you are supposed to be able to fire up the bada IDE, import the project and get to work. At this point, I’ve not been able to make the project build and execute on the bada emulator, but I’m working on it and you’ll find the complete instructions in PhoneGap Essentials when it makes it to print.
If you did a quick Google search on PhoneGap and bada, toward the top of the search results should be the link to a PhoneGap bada tutorial here: http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap/browse_thread/thread/ee8dcd9ca0d2d792. Unfortunately those instructions didn’t work for me. I followed the instructions to the letter and I got an application, but not one that would use any of the PhoneGap API’s. The tutorial instructs you to build a bada web application to use with the PhoneGap API’s, but if you look at the source code folders in the bada PhoneGap download, you’ll see a bunch of C++ library files – which implies that it’s not a web application, but instead a C++ application that the PhoneGap application runs within. Supposedly there are complete instructions available for how to do this, but I have not been able to get my hands on them. If you know how to make the instructions in this tutorial work, please let me know because I cannot.
I’m still working through this and will update you when I have it working. Stay tuned.
BlackBerry World: Day 1 Begins
Tue, May 1st 2012 7:11a John Wargo Got up early this morning and made it over to the hotel’s gym. It was nice to get some exercise in before starting my day. When I finished, I decided to walk around a bit just to get my back loosened up. As I walked past the BlackBerry World registration desk, I thought about my registration process and thought I’d write about it.
This is my 6th BlackBerry World (or Wireless Enterprise Symposium, WES, as it used to be called), so I knew exactly what to do. I walked toward the registration a [read] Keywords: application
blackberry
email
enterprise
rim
wireless
119
Figured out PhoneGap Development for bada
Fri, Apr 27th 2012 7:12a John Wargo If you remember a while ago I published an article (which can be found here) that explained some of the issues I encountered trying to build and run a PhoneGap application for the Samsung bada OS. Well, with the help of the developer who wrote the bada code for PhoneGap I was able to finally figure it out, get it working and finished the bada chapter for PhoneGap Essentials.
First I’m going to complain a little and then I’ll tell you what you need to do to build PhoneGap applications for ba [read] Keywords: application
applications
development
mobile
113
Error Capturing Video using PhoneGap
Thu, Apr 26th 2012 8:11a John Wargo I got up early this morning to answer some last minute questions from my editor for PhoneGap Essentials. We’re almost done with the book; I just had a few questions to answer. The editor asked me to redo one of the screen shots because it was a little blurry. I dug out the device I used to take the screen shot and setup the shot. The device battery had died, so I plugged it into power so it would charge as I began my test. As I loaded the application and started the video capture application u [read] Keywords: application
154
Rhomobile & Domino
Thu, Apr 19th 2012 6:11a John Wargo As part of my role as a technical advisor to the View I decided a long time ago to start writing a series of articles demonstrating all of the different possible ways to mobilize a Notes or Domino application. I had a bunch of ideas and a bunch of different tools I wanted to play with, so I got to work. The cool thing about this was that I wanted to learn these tools, but had so many other things going that I just couldn’t find the time to do it. Fortunately, writing a magazine article about a [read] Keywords: domino
notes
application
database
google
rim
server
141
4,500 Records
Thu, Apr 5th 2012 6:13a John Wargo I came across this press release yesterday:Mobiquity Takes Buildium Mobile; App for Property Management Software Leader Has Native-Like Scrolling. The article explains how the developers were able to build a PhoneGap application that allowed mobile users to scroll through a listing of up to 4,500 records with native-like performance and functionality. While that's probably a pretty good accomplishment, I have to ask why it was ever even done.
Why would you ever want to expose more than four th [read] Keywords: application
mobile
network
249
New Job
Tue, Apr 3rd 2012 7:13p John Wargo You may have noticed that I haven't posted much in a while. Lots going on in my professional life and I've been a bit busy.
I resigned from AT&T a few weeks back. I should't go into why I left, let's just say that it didn't end well.
I have accepted a postion at SAP. I'm in the Mobility Solutions Management group - which is SAP's name for customer-facing product management. I'm really excited to be working at SAP and to be back working for a software company again. In my new role, [read] Keywords: development
mobile
sap
183
Interesting Spam – Airline Ticket
Mon, Apr 2nd 2012 8:11p John Wargo I just received yet another interesting spam message in my inbox. Well actually it wasn’t in my inbox; Outlook recognized it as spam and quarantined it – I’m surprised Norton Antivirus didn’t catch this one (because of the likely infected attachment).
Anyways, here’s a screen shot of the email.
Figure 1
What I imagine happens is someone gets this email and goes “Crikey, I didn’t buy any plane ticket” and opens the attachment to see who purchased a ticket. Of course they open [read] Keywords: email
outlook
294
US Air Doesn't Care
Mon, Mar 5th 2012 7:13a John Wargo Living where I do, I take US Airways flights most of the time. I'm regularly surprised by their inability to use technology effectively and it saddens me. I was checking in for today's flight this morning and decided I wanted to give them some feedback. On the registration form, they asked me for my name, email address and frequent flyer number. Unfortunately, I was already logged into the web site, and this was all information they already had. Why ask me for information when you already have [read] Keywords: email
209
PhoneGap & Samsung bada
Mon, Feb 13th 2012 7:12a John Wargo While working on PhoneGap Essentials, I got a chance to work with some mobile device platforms I’d not worked with before. I did some work with webOS, but as soon as I got ready to write the chapter on webOS development for PhoneGap, HP announced it was killing the platform and the PhoneGap team added support for Windows Phone development. So, I whacked the webOS chapter and cheerfully replaced it with one on Windows Phone.
Another interesting one is Samsung bada, a ‘newer’ OS supposedly [read] Keywords: application
applications
css
development
google
javascript
mobile
wiki
301
Silly CAPTCHA
Wed, Feb 8th 2012 10:11a John Wargo I was registering for access to the Sencha forums (www.sencha.com) today when I saw the following on the registration form:
Figure 1
That's pretty advanced math for a CAPTCHA, isn't it?
So, is the math problem this:
6 – (2 x 3)
Or is it this:
(6 – 2 ) x 3
Having a degree in Physics and more than 30 years of experience as a professional software developer, I was certain I knew what I was doing. However, I'd be lying if I told you I got this right on the first try.
All of my years [read] Keywords: wiki
