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.
nice - should work automagically with our live reload implementation too
if I grok the demo right.
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 ).
Good feedback and I agree - more blogs, more pushes needed.
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.
Yeah everyone needs to reinvent every build tool every 4-5 years ;)
thanks for the writeup!
/max
http://about.me/maxandersen