Kickstarting your Android project with Maven and Androidx86

Let's assume you want to develop Android applications and you want high quality code and high productivity. I just found out two tools that really help kickstarting your Android project.

Prerequisites

• Java 6 installed
• Android SDK installed

AndroidKickstartR

AndroidKickstartR is a simple tools that creates an Android project together with a Maven project with all required dependencies:

Just fill in your ApplicationName, packagename and Main activity, enable the Maven option and click Download it! Extract the zip file and run mvn clean install android:deploy eclipse:eclipse. Notice that when you didn't start any emulator or forgot to create an AVD this step fails, but don't worry. The first thing you're going to hate when developing Android applications is the slow emulator, however there is a nice alternative using Androidx86 that can be executed using VirtualBox: 

Androidx86

Create the VirtualBox image using the directions and get the ipaddress of the emulator, in my case that's 192.168.0.104. Start the adb process and connect it to the Android VirtualBox image: 

adb connect 192.168.0.104

Now we can re-run our maven targets: mvn clean install android:deploy. Open up your Android VirtualBox image, and run your favourite app!

Conclusion

Using AndroidKickstartR you can use Maven for deployment, codequality (i.e. Sonar, mvn sonar:sonar) and continuous integration (i.e. Jenkins). Androidx86 speeds up the development process, every android:deploy really redeploys the app.

Last hint: don't use too much IDE features from Eclipse or IntelliJ and use your IDE just for coding, let Maven handle the build, deployment en quality part. 

Push based builds using Jenkins and GIT

Recently we switched to Git as our Version Control System solution and I still like it. Coming from “(good) old” CVS we used Jenkins as CI server polling CVS for changes. Besides other nice features and advantages, Git also brings nice commit hooks (well, CVS also does but I finally got to use this nice feature). Read more....

How to add calendar controls to a Joomla administrator component

Being home during summer holiday means doing some "home development". Being forced to do a re-make of the feestbordindetuin I found a nice component for showing products and categories (DJ Catalog), without having to implement a whole e-commerce-solution. One of the disadvantages is that is doesn't support the administration of customers and reservations so I built that myself using the MVC structure for Joomla components. Customers can make a reservation for a product, having a start-date and an end-date and of course a reference to the product itself. I wanted to be able to edit the dates myself but I also wanted a calendar-control, well that was easy:

<input class="text_area" type="text" name="date_from" id="date_from" size="32" maxlength="250" value="<?php echo $this->item->date_from;?>" />
<img id="date_from_img" alt="calendar" src="/templates/system/images/calendar.png" class="calendar" onclick="return showCalendar('date_from','%d-%m-%Y');" >


Just add an image next to the input type and don't forget to add the calendar behaviour on top of your form:


JHTML::_('behavior.calendar');


Tada:

Making a reservation for a product using the Joomla built-in calendar control.