I’ve been spending a bit of time this weekend trying to dig into PhoneGap for obvious reasons. I’ve done a couple of basic PhoneGap apps prior to this but I wanted to get the full workflow down. Coming from a Flex/Flash background, I think I got a little spoiled. From what I’ve been able to tell, there’s almost nothing in the HTML/JS stack that can replicate what Flex/Flash Builder do. For this particular challenge I wanted to be able to debug my code on the device. Brian Leroux pointed me in some great directions but during the process I found myself a bit frustrated. There is a lot of “grab this github project, get this dependency, get this github project”, etc. That’s not to say it’s bad, it just wasn’t in a centralized place, which is what I’m used to. Simeon Bateman made an interesting comment to me over IM that I was from the “heavy, all-inclusive camp” whereas JavaScript developers came from the “lightweight, use-as-needed camp”. That’s something I need to get used to.
So here’s some general info I found while going through this process. Big disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump than anything, so it isn’t meant to be all that informative, but I wanted to jot it down for my own memory. Comments are welcome.
Aardwolf
The first thing I tried was Aardwolf, which seems really, really awesome. It’s essentially a remote debugger written in JavaScript. You open up the HTML page, which has a JavaScript console, and then load your application up on the device. It uses Node.js, which I thought was pretty slick, and by dropping a script into your page you can set breakpoints in the JavaScript console to test code. Sadly, I couldn’t get it to work. My main issue was that I had a hell of a time figuring out how to get the Node.js server exposed outside of my Mac correctly. I think I got close, but it stumped me. That’s not necessarily a knock on Aardwolf, because it looks really, really slick, I just didn’t have the Apache knowledge to pull it off. I’m going to revisit this one later.
Weinre
Weinre ended up being the winner for me. It seems like an absolutely perfect solution for the PhoneGap world because as long as you’ve exposed your Mac to web sharing, you can use the Mac client and with a simple line of code, you have access to everything about your application you’d expect from something like the Chrome Developer Tools. I think I’ll try to do a more in-depth blog post on this in the near future, but for now, here’s my rough setup:
I downloaded the Mac client from this page. I had web sharing on my Mac set up for the IP address 10.1.0.4. When it starts up, the Weinre client creates a ~/.weinre/ directory but if you want to customize the app at all you need to create a server.properties file in that directory. With this you can specify the host that the Weinre debugger will connect to. Mine was this:
boundHost: 10.1.0.4 httpPort: 8080 reuseAddr: true readTimeout: 1 deathTimeout: 5
Now the Weinre debugger is using the same IP address that any other devices use to connect to my Mac when they share the same network. When I read through the Weinre documentation, the examples focused on browser-apps that would be able to load a URL from that 10.1.0.4 URL. So at first I was kind of confused where PhoneGap fit in. But then I had my “duh” moment: one of the beautiful things with PhoneGap is that we’re just dealing with a web view instance in a native app. So all I had to do was take the script block that the “default” page creates for you and put that in my PhoneGap code. I started with the default PhoneGap template from Dreamweaver so I just added that line to my app:
<html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Beer Inventory</title> <link href="jquery-mobile/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <script src="http://10.1.0.4:8080/target/target-script-min.js#anonymous"></script> <script src="jquery-mobile/jquery-1.5.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="jquery-mobile/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <!-- This reference to phonegap.js will allow for code hints as long as the current site has been configured as a mobile application. To configure the site as a mobile application, go to Site -> Mobile Applications -> Configure Application Framework... --> <script src="/phonegap.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/test.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head>
It’s that first script block that gives me access to the Weinre debugger. Then I built that app and packaged it into an .apk file and installed it on my phone.
Voila! I automatically had access to all of the Weinre features for my PhoneGap app!
Fantastic!….err…..sort of
Being able to inspect elements and change them on the fly is awesome, but then I wanted to debug some JavaScript code. Turns out you can’t do that with Weinre (yet). This is one of the things that Aardwolf is really great at, but it has to tie into Node.js to get the breakpoints to work. Plus you have to manually enter an array of breakpoints in the JavaScript console to get it to work. I wasn’t able to get past the step of making Aardwolf and my local Node.js server accessible to my device, so I wasn’t able to test it. Plus I’m not totally sure how Aardwolf would work with PhoneGap, but I *think* it should. My plan this week is to try and get Aardwolf and my app running on Heroku so I don’t have to worry about making my local Node.js server accessible but I wasn’t able to do that tonight.
Welcome to the edge
As far as I can tell, we’re getting into some edgy territory here. Even the Google searches are pretty sparse. So if you’re coming from the Flash/Flex world, I think there will be some learning curves.
But I set out to do this with Android. For iOS, arguably the platform that is the most important, it’s way easy because the tools are much better. Since all PhoneGap projects are native projects, you can use the exact same debugging/deployment workflow as other iOS apps. That means you can leverage the power of Xcode to help out. I haven’t spent a ton of time in Xcode, so I’ll be spending some cycles on that this week as well, but it looks much, much nicer.
I’m really excited to spend a lot more time on PhoneGap. I think building apps with HTML/JS is kind of fun, even if there are some rough edges. Based on my experiments so far, the Flex/Flash story with AIR is way, way, WAY better than anything on the HTML/JS side for building mobile apps, including PhoneGap. But the world is embracing HTML and JavaScript and by learning JavaScript, as a developer, you will never be more versatile. So in that respect, PhoneGap is a great way to start bridging the gap between Flex/Flash and the HTML/JS ecosystem. So far I’m having fun.
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