[jbosstools-dev] Feedback on JBoss Tools Cordova

[Mickael Istria]

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.
-- 
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat <http://www.jboss.org/tools>
My blog <http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com> - My Tweets 
<http://twitter.com/mickaelistria>
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