Ecommerce developers with Magento

If you are in the business of developing a mobile application or external web/desktop or some other application/service that needs to communicate with Magento trough its API, then my friend you are out of luck. I am not going to say Magento API is a trash, I’ll simply say it massively lacks certain methods within the existing exposed classes that will make your external application usable.

My apologies for a bit misleading title, as there is no PHP Confirmation dialog as such. More precisely its a analogy of JavaScript confirmation dialog and Android (Java) alternative for the same thing.

For the last few days I have been intensively playing with Android and Magento XMLRPC API. One of the trickiest things for me as a PHP developer was to figure out how to parse the data returned from XMLRPC API. Most of the time you will most likely have a proper documentation that will clearly outline the result data format. However, its nice to grasp some basic logic and learn a thing or two.

As a web developer you have surely heard for AJAX. Its one of those cool things that give your web app more dynamic interface by fetching various data behind the scene. So, whats the analogy with the Android platform?

Well, in Android, or better yet Java development you have more robust solution for doing things “behind the scene”. This solution is called threading. Not to go to deeply in explaining, consider it as a parallel mini app/code that executes along other code stuff enabling more fluid app behavior without any (or without too much) non responsive interfaces.

Finally Magento 1.4.1.0 has been released. Its been “forever” since we got stuck with Magento 1.4.0.1. Anyhow, its always nice to have updated, bug fixed, and a bit improved version of your software. Especially if it brings money to your table. Hope all of you site owners will enjoy this new release.

As mentioned in one of my previous articles, usually when you are trying out a different platform or language you try to find the analogy of what you done in your “yesterdays” programming language in regards to the new one.

One such cool analogy, as I see it, is the analogy of web’s POST & GET methods to the Androids “Intent” mechanism. Strange as it might seem, but I find those two pretty similar. Let me elaborate.

In web you have these forms with various input fields trough which you gather user data an submit them (via POST or GET) to some script. Usually this results in you ending up on the different page that was rendered based on the logic that handled the data you inputed on the previous page.

Recently I became proud owner of HTC Desire mobile device powered by Android platform. This is something I got my boss Tomislav Bilic to thank to. Even before (several weeks before) getting my real Android powered phone, I started poking around Android platform. Behind this interest was my desire is was/is to do mobile eCommerce apps. As I have been involved in everyday Magento development for the last two years now, it was only logical for my first steps to do something Magento-Android related.

Switching from one programming language to another usually means checking up on few basic things and trying to replicate code functionality from one language to another. For those of you in the PHP world like me that are trying to start the Android development here is a brief look on how foreach loop can be done in Android (Java).

Recently I have been engaged in Android development. Most of my work is focused on Magento-Android related app. This PHP to Android step actually means PHP to Java (with some sugar on top of it).

Although there are significant difference between Java and PHP, personally I find Java pretty easy. Most likely due to my past experience with C# language. Anyhow, lets get back to the topic of this post “From PHP to Android, the simple stuff – What about arrays”.

Haven’t wrote an article for a while, so here is a short one.

Are you sick of Magento XML layouts? If so, then do it all via the code, from the controller .