Android Book Mobile (1 week later)

It's been a great first week for ABM on the market. Over 1,400 downloads and still carrying a 4 star rating! Here is a screen shot of the Android Market -- Developer Console. It shows all the applications you have published with their current stats.

One statistic that would be great if I knew how often people are using it. If I had my own server-side to the application I could gather that statistic myself. But alas, the data being stored at books.google.com, and the reviews coming from goodreads.com, I don't know how much they are using it. I fully expect someone will tell me their phone ran out of memory trying to load their full library.

Android Book Mobile

I entered my Android application into the Android Developer Challenge II. You can read more about what "Book Mobile" does and my thoughts behind the name over at the product website.

• I've integrated the Google book api into Android.
  
• I use the GoodReads api to get reviews for books.
• I integrated with zxing for barcode scanning to read ISBNs.
  
• Because of this missing feature in Android I had to draft my own login dialog for users to enter their google account credentials.

Now for the frustrating part. How they setup the registration/entry process to the ADC means if I want my application available on the market, I have to repackage. This means changing the AndroidManifest.xml and refactoring all the code to have a new package structure. That doesn't seem so bad, right?

Launch Explorer.exe from Cygwin

Working in cygwin, I often need an explorer window to my current directory or a sub-directory there of. I called this script expl.sh.

#!/bin/bash
export p=`pwd`
export pc=`cygpath -w $p/$1`
explorer.exe /root,$pc &

Once you have this the directory on your path where you keep your scripts: perhaps ~/scripts:
expl.sh
expl.sh some/sub/directory

Google App Engine and GWT

Well, I started poking around with Goole app engine in Eclipse. By default they want to use GWT. fine. Someone once said, "when drinking the tainted cool-aid you might as well eat the cookie too." (if no one said it then I just did)

Well, I develop on Ubuntu and immediately ran into an UnsatisfiedLinkError.

** Unable to load Mozilla for hosted mode **
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/user/projects/gwt-linux-1.5.3
/mozilla-1.7.12/libxpcom.so: libstdc++.so.5:

Thankfully, this was the first hit on by search. Thank you

When to Refactor

It's common knowledge that you don't write code in a software project to solve future problems. Don't implement code that is not needed.

It occurred to me that the inverse is true for refactoring. I will not delay a refactor because we expect to have a requirement that will make it obsolete. You never know which features/tasks will be canceled or delayed. You should ask yourself, "How long am I willing to support this ugly code?"

Subversive Eclipse on Jaunty Ubuntu

I got all obsessed over the weekend. I needed stable sound from my laptop. I mean really, who can code without music!? I don't want to talk about that. I had a painful path form Hardy to Jaunty. But that's not why I'm posting.

After a complete re-install of Ubuntu I was reinstalling Eclipse and Subversive. It failed. The "SVN Connectors" drop down was empty. Turned out I fell victim to a bad link over to Polarion. That was answered over on stackoverflow. As stated in that answer, this is the right update site url to get the connectors from Polarion: http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/


I wanted to use the javaHL connector, so I also needed this step.

• sudo apt-get install libsvn-java
  
• put "-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni" in eclipse.ini
  

Thanks guys/gals. Hopefully I won't forget how to do this stuff. (next time an OC urge strikes to set myself back 3 days)

J2EE Connector Architecture

J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) is a little used aspect of J2EE that is probably now relegated to obscurity due to the popularity of web services. It is however a viable solution to many problems. You can still find it documented at sun. You can also rather nicely integrate Spring.

I put this short presentation together. Contact me if you would like the three Eclipse projects.