James' Blog

Recent Android Application

The MovieTix application uses a native Android client application which accesses RESTful web services exposed on the internet via HTTP. The architecture that we used was based on the standard 3-tier model. The client tier is represented by the native Android mobile application. The web tier uses the Mongrel application server, which uses the Ruby on Rails framework. Lastly the database tier uses MySQL.  The data is passed between client and server by using XML representations of the data as rendered by the Rails controllers.  Once the client receives the data SAX is used to parse the data instead of DOM so that we don’t need to load the entire XML object into memory.

Partners: David Kuo, Ryan Zhou

AndroidMobileTix

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Android vs. WPF vs. ???

Why do I compare Android to WPF?  They both seem to use some type of proprietary XML markup language to create their UI’s.  I suppose that this can lead to greater separation between UI/View code and codebehind/controller code.  MS has some software called Blend that generates the XAML for you with a WYSIWYG. Using the expression blend software from MS is suppose to allow graphical artists to be able to create UI’s without knowing too much about coding.  I wonder if this is really the case.

Obviously this idea isn’t new since web programmers have been using HTML/XML/XHTML for a long time now separating their view code from  server-side code.  Are we moving toward some direction here?  I wonder what other new technologies are adopting this web programming paradigm.

More Android fun facts

1. Linearlayout doesn’t support scrolling natively, so you can use a ScrollView instead.  Problem is the ScrollView can only have one element inside of it so you have to wrap all you stuff with, say, a LinearLayout to put inside the ScrollView.

2. When you start an activity within you main activity, you can pass data to it using something called a Bundle.  Look here

access Android Log file

adb logcat

from a terminal window

Android Network Calls

<uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.INTERNET” />
add this to the bottom of the manifest file right before
Someone said the new sdk requires permission for network calls.

log on OSX (leopard)

tail /private/var/log/system.log

private/var/log/apache2/error_log

had to “touch” it to create it, don’t know why

Android learning pains

Creating my first android application today.  First challenge, “Application … has stopped unexpectedly.”  After trying to create a new intent to open a new window.  Put a try/catch around it and found out that it wasn’t printing exceptions to the console.  And the cause of the exception was that the Activity that my Intent was trying to start was not found.  Why wasn’t it found?  Turns out it wasn’t listed in the manifest file.  Added, worked… done.  Using Eclipse for this project seemed a bit harder than using the compact framework on Visual Studio 2008 where a lot of programming help is given by the IDE.