In this post, I’ll be discussing the steps required to created an Android application using the PhoneGap framework. For those of you who don’t know, PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies. So although we are generating a native Android application (APK file) that can be put on Google Play, the actual views of our application will be made up by web pages, embedded in your native app in a WebView.
PhoneGap promotes the idea of a single code-base (the part containing the html / javascript / stylesheets) where you use the PhoneGap platform to generate native packages for different mobile platforms like iOS, Android, …… There will always be a mobile platform specific part associated with a PhoneGap project, the native part, required to generate the mobile platform specific artifact (Android APK file, iOS IPA file,….)
I’ve decided to use the foursquare-api-java, a project hosted at Google Code, as it offers a rich interface to interact with Foursquare. The same API calls are possible through the Google API client for Java, but it would require you to write your own model classes to do the JSON to Java translation.
I will post some sample code here on how this can be done with the Google APIs client library for java.
In the sample application hosted at Github, we’re going to display a map where the user can select a location. Upon selecting a location, we’ll load up a list of Foursquare venues that the user can select.
Upon selecting a venue, we’ll return to our map, put a marker on the map representing the venue, and allow the user to perform a checkin.
A couple of months ago, I published a post entitled A 30 minute guide to integrating Twitter in your Android application.. The post presented a sample Android application to integrate Twitter. Using the signpost library, the user was able to authorize our application to send tweets on his/her behalf. It seems that everyone is migrating to Oauth 2.0, but Twitter is still stuck at OAuth 1.0. Nevertheless, I still wanted to update the sample we did a couple of months ago for 3 reasons :
In this article, I’ll be showing you how to create a widget for the Android homescreen. Widgets can be useful to provide condensed information, without necessarily having to open your application. In addition to showing information, a widget can also be used to trigger certain actions related to your application. Instead of forcing the user to open up your application and navigating to a certain screen to perform an action, a widget can provide the user with a quick shortcut to that action. You can also dynamically change the layout of your widget (ex: when the user presses a button, the button can be highlighted, or a piece of text can altered). This article is accompanied by a sample android application that includes the widgets we’ll be discussing here.
As mentioned in the Facebook developer docs, test users can only be created using a call to the Graph API.
As described in my previous Facebook article, a dedicated webpage was available at the time to create test users, however, that page has been brought offline.
You can create a test user associated with a particular app using the Graph API with your app access token.
Today we’ll be looking at the Google APIs Client Library for Java. The API is provided by Google, and is a flexible, efficient, and powerful Java client library for accessing any HTTP-based API’s on the web. According to Google, it is the recommended library for accessing Google API’s based on REST or JSON-RPC. One of the nice things about this library is that it fully supports the Android environment out of the box. So we’ll focus on those features in this article.
To avoid confusion, Google offers the following APIs (the first one being the topic of this post, and compatible with the Android platform) :
The goal of this article is to get Facebook integration up & running from your Android app in 30 minutes. The guide will show you how to
setup a Faceook test account
register a Facebook application
authenticate the user in your Android application.
have the user update his Facebook wall from your Android application.
This guide is accompanied by a sample application that’s available in Github in the AndroidFacebookSample repository. To import this project in Eclipse, I suggest using the EGit plugin that can be installed via the Main P2 Repository located at http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates.
Before running this project, make sure you change the com.ecs.android.facebook.Sample.AndroidFacebookSample file to include your Facebook API key (see subsequent section).
Once you have sample application up & running, you can copy the relevant classes into your projects to have Facebook up & running from your Android application.
First things first … In order to integrate with Facebook, you need 2 things :
A Facebook test account, used in our Android application to login to Facebook and make status updates.
A Facebook application, used to inform the user in your Android application that this application is requesting you to login to Facebook.
