Hi all,
I went to see this presentation yesterday
http://humantalks.com/talks/347-demonstration-de-cordova-cli and had
the opportunity to show the demo to 4 people who are actual Cordova
users.
The presentation, from Sebastien Paul, was mainly showing simple
usage of Cordova CLI. The demo showed many things that are available
in the Cordova Eclipse plugins as well (create a project, add
plugin, start ios emulator...). The only thing he didn't have in his
CLI demo compared to the video is CordovaSim/Ripple.
He also demoed something nice: a livereload-cordova plugin (
https://github.com/fingerproof/cordova-plugin-gapreload and
https://vimeo.com/81192559 ). This is interesting because it allows
to configure the packaged application (the apk, ios, or whatever
actual package) to use livereload to check for updates of some of
its resources. So you can get livereload enabled on your actual
tests devices while developing a cordova application and see updates
without any need to repackage or redeploy the application. It's IMO
a great productivity boost. Of course, this is something people
wouldn't like to ship as part of there delivery, and is only good
for development purpose. See last paragraph for more thoughts on
this topic.
Feedback on JBoss Tools Cordova was quite positive. However, no-one
did even know such tools were existing. Some Cordova users are not
at all aware of what is JBoss and never started an Eclipse, although
they'd be glad to use it for Cordova development as shown in the
video. Some said they'll show the demo to some colleagues who are
used to do Android development, and that they're pretty sure they'll
start using Cordova Tools today.
From this, we can deduce that:
1. Our tools really matches the current needs of users, and that's
great
2. Those same tools are unknow to most of potential users. In order
to become famous, it appears we need to communicate about it in
Cordova/Phonegap specific channels (mailing-list, get retweeted by
@apachecordova and @phonegap ).
Related to the concept of having plugins in a dev-mode, we discussed
the idea of "profiles", similar to what Maven does, which would
allow to package application in different flavours: Use this plugin
in dev-mode with this set of properties (for example pointing to
local IP address), whereas production should not ship this plugin
and use the production URL... This would be an interesting feature.
That's all folks.