Android:

 

- Unlike iOS development, developing Android apps and compiling them has many different alternatives. But as a maintainer of Android, Google puts Eclipse + ADT option in the first place. So, I think at least there should be an option for AeroGear to use it with Eclipse + ADT setup. Especially using community tools to build is initially harder for newbies (e.g. I tried to get maven running on eclipse using m2eclipse, and todo app does not compile on my eclipse while it does on terminal). Some bugs and configuration changes in maven, maven-android, android-sdk-deployer and m2eclipse slowed down the initial steps, i.e. it was not as quick and straightforward as AeroGear iOS API to get the first app running.

- Sending query parameters to server side is slightly different on iOS and Android (or maybe I couldn't find the same way, but Android sends where clause as JSON object, while iOS sends key-value pairs as HTTP GET query parameters). So, I needed to update my server side (which i developed for iOS) to use it for Android (or I could build my where clause in iOS manually).

HTML5:

 

- As AeroGear.js uses AJAX to connect to the backend, and in my case (also I believe in most cases) as my RESTful endpoint was not residing on the same host with my app, I needed to use jsonp data type, which requires different response format. Therefore I needed to update my server side (again - it was designed for iOS and updated for Android).

- When I create a pipe, I specify the baseURL and my endpoint, but I needed to specify the data type when I was actually reading from the pipe. I felt like if I know what my endpoint returns in terms of its data and application type, then I should be able to set data type while creating my pipe.

- Although documentation is not complete yet, AeroGear.js file is well commented (going through the comments, it's easy to understand what and how to do).

 

 

Hybrid with Cordova:

 

- The documentation for converting HTML5 + REST apps to Hybrid apps uses some directory names (e.g. "ios") which causes confusion (when I read, I got confused about whether the directory named "ios" is what I can choose its name or it is something Cordova or Xcode creates and so it is a required name or directory in all apps).

- HTML5 documentation and example app employs modernizr for feature detection (mobile or desktop) and to load appropriate libraries accordingly. However, modernizr does not load fast in hybrid app (though hybrid app is for sure mobile, I first kept all the implementation as it is to make it "implement once and use for all builds -HTML5, iOS hybrid and Android hybrid-", but it didn't work). After removing modernizr from HTML5 implementation and loading only mobile libs, it required no more effort to make html5 app hybrid (it just did work).

I also have a question, and your answers and/or directions are appreciated in advance.

- For now, I created some simple REST API's in PHP to try the mobile side libs. What is your recommendation of building server side (which uses existing database let's say) if it is going to be used with AeroGear? I mean, is it OK to go with PHP to provide REST API, and then add another layer using AeroGear controller? Or should I go with Java implementation from the start? So, to restate and simplify: my AeroGear controller needs to connect to an existing LDAP instance. What's the AeroGear recommended approach for this?

Thanks for your time to read (and respond). Cheers,

---

Yavuz Selim Yilmaz

SUNY at Buffalo

Computer Science and Engineering

PhD Candidate

_______________________________________________
aerogear-dev mailing list
aerogear-dev@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-dev