PhoneGap and Android

[Colin Clark]

Neeti,

Sorry for the delay in responding. We've all been pretty consumed with the upcoming Engage 0.3b mobile release.

It sounds like you're making some exciting progress on PhoneGap and 2D barcode support for Engage mobile! I'm hoping you might be willing to be more active in the community, sharing your in-progress source code and participating in weekly developer meetings? We'd love to be able to see your progress and have the opportunity to help you out and contribute to it ourselves.

First steps: we should pair you up with a mentor and get you commit access to the incubator space of Fluid's SVN repository. I'm thinking Antranig might be a good option for a mentor, if he's willing. Otherwise, I'd be happy to lend a hand.

This page describes a number of the development practices we follow in the Fluid community, and describes the different levels of repository access:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Coding+and+Commit+Standards#CodingandCommitStandards-RepositoryLevels

Colin

On 2010-02-03, at 8:14 AM, Neeti Sharad Wagle wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Ive been working on figuring out how to use PhoneGap (http://phonegap.com/) for Android development.  Here are some of things Ive done so far:
> 	• Downloaded and imported PhoneGap into Eclipse. This was pretty simple and direct based on the instructions given in the Starting Guide. I then tested the Android Application on the emulator. However, since PhoneGap's javascript demo example included several features like Accelerometer, Geolocation, Vibrate the emulator run was not very satisfactory. Also a lot of the comments to the post mentioned having problems with these features on the ADPs. I have at this point tested these features on the phone and they all work correctly.
> 	• The next question was whether PhoneGap allowed extending the Java functionality.  I added a new class to their src code under a new package named 'extension'.  I implemented the class to have a single beep function which I copied from a function already present in PhoneGap. I then modified the ringtone used in the beep. Finally I linked the javascript call to this new class and its function. I have tested this both on the emulator and the dev phone and it works correctly.
> 	• Opening the browser and loading a URL passed from the Javascript.  There is no direct class or function that handles opening URLs in PhoneGap. So I wrote a new function in my extension to do this. However, my function currently opens a browser outside of PhoneGap.
> On this background, I am currently working on two different aspects of the project
> 	• Once the URL is loaded in an external browser I believe the control goes outside PhoneGap. The only way to get back to PhoneGap is to use the Back button. For this reason, Im checking if I can fork a thread and open a child view with an embedded browser. I am not sure how easy or difficult this is, but I think this thread on the google group was exploring similar possibilties.  Unfortunately, the trail has been cold for a while.
> 	• I have downloaded and imported the ZXing (zebra crossing) project's code for barcode generation and reading.  This comes up as 3 different projects in Eclipse : zxing, zxing_client and BarcodeGenerator. I am now looking into how this code can be included or called from the extended Java code I am writing under PhoneGap. My first approach is going to be to load ZXing's apk on the droid and understand the interaction between the barcode generation, barcode scanning and decoding, and loading the relative URL in the browser. This should help me articulate the use-cases which would help me understand how I want the code bases to speak to each other.
> I would greatly appreciate any suggestions and please do correct me if I have not quite completely or correctly grasped any of these constructs.
> 
> Regards
> -- 
> Neeti Wagle
> PhD Student
> Department of Computer Science
> University of Colorado at Boulder
> http://csel.cs.colorado.edu/~waglen/
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---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org