It is well known that iPhone has nice set of native controls for UI elements. Basically, when my colleagues worked on Magentic iPhone application I wanted to make one for Android too. But on Android platform, I don’t have same type user interface controls, so I decided to explore power of Android native options in order to create my custom UI.
Of course that we can use these steps to make any custom UI element for Android application.
When trying to access Magento SOAP web services v2 from Android, after some searching on web, I found that ksoap2-android project could be useful to implement SOAP client in android project. (Ksoap2-android is lightweight and efficient SOAP client library for android platform).
Next step was to figure-out how to use it.
After some additional investigation, I found that it is pretty simple to use, when you get used to it once.
This time, I played a little with Threads and I tried to implement somekind of simple-test separate thread and start it inside main activity and also return results from separate Thread so it can be used to update UI for example.
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Let’s play a little with BroadcastReceiver: we will try to send a message from Android service we made to Activity and log that message.
Let’s use our Android service tutorial project from one of my earlier articles.
First of all we need to define private variable in our Activity:
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Sometimes we need to define global variables accesible from inside our android application to hold some shared values.
Simplest way to implement this is to subclass Android.app.Application class and define static variables that will hold our data.
When you look at my posts on this blog, you will, besides few posts about WordPress and Zend find most articles about Symfony2 development.
Well, now things are about to change slightly.
Recently I realized that there are many questions regarding my “Develop your own Magento mobile application” article, and many new articles need to be written to answer them all properly and to guide you further through developing this kind of an application.
That is why I would like to present you an Android application, developed for the purpose of utilizing Magento’s XMLConnect and exploring possible modularity of the future application – mainly only a concept.
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Hi everybody.
Do you want to develop your own Magento mobile application?
Great! I’ll give you some pointers on how to get a grasp on Magento’s XMLConnect, an extension that serves Magento Mobile application.
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There I was yesterday, sitting at the caffe bar, waiting for friends to arrive. Newspaper news were boring since the topics were all about standard politics. During these times I often check latest comments on this blog and moderate (approve or spam) them. Logging to the administration via my HTC desire was a pain and clicking on that tiny “Approve” link is even more painful. I was thinking that native Android App would be of great help.
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Hello everyone. For the last few months I have had a lot of work on my hands, thus ignoring my Android development skills. Lately however, seems like my appetite for mobile apps development is back. Or is it just my way of escaping the everyday struggle with large Magento database and sea of custom code. Anyhow, Android platform is a great exhaust valve for me.
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One of my planned projects in the upcoming 2011 is the Magento – Android application. I already did a fair part on the Android side, plus I started the Magento Mapy extension few weeks ago. Due to my recent one month vacation I was “off the grid” when it comes to my free time work so all my stuff were in a “pause mode”.
Besides my playing around with Android and XML-RPC, here is a simple JSON parsing example that might get you started with more serious things.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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