Skip to content

All posts by moore - 45. page

Accessing more build information from your Cordova CLI hooks

Hooks now give you, as of cordova CLI 3.3.1-0.4.2, much more information about the environment you were executing in.

Before, if I had platform specific code, I needed to check at runtime:

App.config.flurryid = "";
    if (window.device && window.device.platform) {
        if (window.device.platform == "Android") {
            App.config.flurryid = /*REP*/ 'notreallyanandroidflurryid' /*REP*/ ;
        }
        if (window.device.platform == "iOS") {
            App.config.flurryid = /*REP*/ 'notreallyaniosflurryidxxx' /*REP*/ ;
        }
    }

Now, you can inject platform specific code at build time, via hooks. The runtime code is simplified to 

App.config.flurryid = /*REP*/ 'myflurryid' /*REP*/;

and you just replace 'myflurryid' with the appropriate value from your configuration file (more on platform specific configuration files).

From the readme in the hooks directory:

All scripts are run from the project’s root directory and have the root directory passes as the first argument. All other options are passed to the script using environment variables:

* CORDOVA_VERSION – The version of the Cordova-CLI.
* CORDOVA_PLATFORMS – Comma separated list of platforms that the command applies to (e.g.: android, ios).
* CORDOVA_PLUGINS – Comma separated list of plugin IDs that the command applies to (e.g.: org.apache.cordova.file, org.apache.cordova.file-transfer)
* CORDOVA_HOOK – Path to the hook that is being executed.
* CORDOVA_CMDLINE – The exact command-line arguments passed to cordova (e.g.: cordova run ios –emulate)

Here’s a sample plugin which you can put in your hooks/before_prepare directory. If you do this and then run cordova -d prepare you can see the values for all the variables. 

#!/usr/bin/env node

console.log("process.env.CORDOVA_VERSION: "+process.env.CORDOVA_VERSION);
console.log("process.env.CORDOVA_PLATFORMS: "+process.env.CORDOVA_PLATFORMS);
console.log("process.env.CORDOVA_PLUGINS: "+process.env.CORDOVA_PLUGINS);
console.log("process.env.CORDOVA_HOOK: "+process.env.CORDOVA_HOOK);
console.log("process.env.CORDOVA_CMDLINE: "+process.env.CORDOVA_CMDLINE);

Here’s the output for a test project.

Executing hook 

""/home/mooreds/git/testproject3/hooks/before_prepare/test.js" 

"/home/mooreds/git/testproject3""
process.env.CORDOVA_VERSION: 3.3.1-0.4.2
process.env.CORDOVA_PLATFORMS: android
process.env.CORDOVA_PLUGINS: 
process.env.CORDOVA_HOOK: /home/mooreds/git/testproject3/hooks/before_prepare/test.js
process.env.CORDOVA_CMDLINE: node /usr/local/bin/cordova -d prepare

Note that if you are using this for platform specific code, you will want to run the commands separately: cordova build android and cordova build ios. If you just run cordova build and you have both ios and android platforms installed, the process.env.CORDOVA_PLATFORMS variable will be android,ios, and your code won’t be able to differentiate between them.

If you want to know about more Cordova CLI changes, check out “3 Cordova CLI Changes You Should Know About” which covers version 3.3.1-0.3.1.

Cordova CLI Phonegap | moore |

How to use platform specific configuration in your Cordova app

This post comes out of a question I answered over at the guest post I did on Devgirl’s blog, ‘Three Hooks Your Cordova Project Needs’.

A commenter asked:

How do you retain the project level settings for cordova Android projects? Platforms folder removes project level setting when you run ‘cordova platform rm android’

I answered over there, but thought I’d expand a bit and write a post here.

When you are doing Cordova development, there are two main tooling paradigms. You can use native tooling (Eclipse, XCode) to manage your source, edit your javascript and CSS, etc–this is called ‘Native Platform Dev’. Or you can use tooling more typically used in web development (a text editor like Sublime or vi) plus Cordova CLI–this is called ‘Web Project Dev’. Here’s a bit more on the names of these paradigms.

In the first case, you are probably not removing the files under platform all that often–you are more likely to work out of that directory. In the second case, everything under platform is derived from your www directory, plus your plugins, so you can remove the platform directory easily.

I can’t really speak to Native Platform Dev, because it isn’t a Cordova workflow I’ve used. My book is entirely about Web Project Dev and how to do it most efficiently. If that is your paradigm, I imagine you won’t have much trouble with platform specific settings, because the native tooling is pretty good about capturing that in version control, so you can rely on it.

If, on the other hand, you are using Web Project Dev, then if you want to modify platform specific settings, you have three options:
You need to either:

  1. Only modify your project in ways that can be expressed in config.xml. Review the config.xml reference and the platform guides to figure out if your needed customization can be captured in this way.
  2. Write an after_platform_add hook which copies your changes over from elsewhere in your source tree (if you have a modified .java file for example).
  3. Write a plugin which modifies an XML files (AndroidManifest.xml) to insert your needed project level config, (an IntentFilter, for example), and add that plugin to your project in an an after_platform_add. Note you can only add XML nodes to config files with plugins, you can’t modify attributes or remove nodes.

Which of these is correct for you depends on exactly which platform specific feature you are trying to modify.

Cordova CLI Tips | moore |

Want your next software purchase to ‘talk’ to your existing systems?

I wrote a post, over at the Geek Estate Blog (one of the best real estate tech blogs, imho) about APIs and why if you are a realtor or a broker, you should look for software with an API

Well, first, let’s talk about what an API is. API stands for “Applications Programming Interface”–not very illuminating. What that means is that the software providing the API has a way to allow other software (applications) to interact (interface) with it, with no human involvement. That is, the two software systems can ‘talk’ to each other.

Full post here.

8z APIs | moore |

How to access your QuickBooks Online data via API from the command line

As is so often with this blog, I’m documenting something that took me a long time to figure out.

The problem: the company I work for has data in QuickBooks Online (QBO) that we’d like to distribute elsewhere in our organization.

The answer: QBO has an API. Yahoo! They have several different SDKs (for .NET, Java and PHP) to make access even easier. (The APIs and surrounding docs are called the Intuit Partner Platform, or IPP.)

However…

The issue is that requests to the QBO API must be authenticated with OAuth (I believe it is OAuth 1.0a). And the entire Intuit Partner Platform documentation is focused on needs of developers who are building SaaS applications that consume or augment QBO data and are accessed via the QBO webapp. Which means there’s a heavy focus on web applications and OAuth flows via web applications.

But all I wanted was a command line client that could use the API’s query interface.

I was stymied by OAuth. In particular, I couldn’t find a way to get the accessToken and accessTokenSecret. I tried a number of different tacks (I beat my head against this for the better part of day).

But I just couldn’t find a way to generate the needed tokens, with either the PHP or Java SDK clients (most of the links in this post are for the Java client, because that’s more mature–the PHP client doesn’t support JSON output or have reference documentation).

Desperate, I turned to the IPP forums, which were full of advanced questions. I did stumble on this gem: “Simple way to integrate with our Quickbooks Account”, which took me to the OAuth Playground for IPP Developers. And, voila, if you follow the steps in the playground (I used IE because FireFox failed), you will end up with a valid accessToken and accessTokenSecret.

So, with that sad story told, here’s exactly how you can take access your own QBO data via the command line (I only cover a trial account here, but believe the process is much the same with a paid account):

  1. Start your IE browser (I’m using IE 10 on windows 8)
  2. Go to https://developer.intuit.com/us
  3. Sign up (click the ‘join’ link), click ‘remember me’
  4. Go to your email and find the verify link that was sent to you. Paste it into your IE browser.
  5. Sign in again
  6. Click on ‘My Apps’
  7. Click on ‘Create New App’, then ‘QuickBooks API’
  8. Fill out the name of the app, and the other required items. You can change these all later (I think). I know you can change the URLs later.
  9. Select the level of data access you need. Since this is a test app, you can select ‘All Accounting’
  10. Click ‘Save’
  11. Open up another tab in IE and go to the QuickBooks Online site (We are just adding some dummy data here, so if you have an account, you can skip this.)
  12. Click on ‘Free Trial’
  13. Click on ‘QuickBooks Online Plus’
  14. Click on ‘Already have an Intuit user ID’
  15. Fill out the username and password you used on when you signed up for your developer account.
  16. Ignore the upsell, if any
  17. Click the customers tab
  18. Click on the ‘new customer’ button
  19. Enter a first name and last name then press save
  20. Open a new tab and go to the API Console
  21. Choose the company that you want to access, and note the number next to that name. That is the company ID or the Realm ID.
  22. Open a new tab and go to the OAuth playground
  23. Go back to the developer.intuit.com tab
  24. Grab your app token (looks like b3197323bda36333b4b5fb17774440fe34d6)
  25. Go to the OAuth playground tab and put your app token in the proper field (called ‘App Token’). You’ll also want to have that later, so note it now.
  26. Click ‘Get Key and Secret using App Token’
  27. Note the consumer key and consumer secret, you’ll need them later.
  28. Click ‘Get Request Token Using Key and Secret’
  29. Click ‘Authorize Request Token’
  30. You should see a message like ‘testapp3 would like to access your Intuit company data’
  31. Click ‘Authorize’
  32. You should see a message like ‘You are securely connected to testapp3’
  33. Click ‘Return to TestApp3’
  34. Scroll down to the bottom, and you should see entries in the ‘Access Token’ and ‘Access Token Secret’ fields. Copy those, as you’ll need them later as well.
  35. Go to the SDKs page of developer.intuit.com
  36. Pick your language of choice, and follow the installation instructions.
  37. Follow the instructions in the ‘Data Service APIs’ section about setting up your environment. For Java, you’ll need to pull a few jar files into your classpath. Here’s my list of jar files in my Eclipse build path: ipp-java-qbapihelper-1.2.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar, ipp-v3-java-devkit-2.0.3-jar-with-dependencies.jar
  38. Write and run a class (like the one below) that runs a query, plugging in the six variables the values you captured above.
import static com.intuit.ipp.query.GenerateQuery.$;
import static com.intuit.ipp.query.GenerateQuery.select;

import com.intuit.ipp.core.Context;
import com.intuit.ipp.core.ServiceType;
import com.intuit.ipp.data.Customer;
import com.intuit.ipp.exception.FMSException;
import com.intuit.ipp.query.GenerateQuery;
import com.intuit.ipp.security.OAuthAuthorizer;
import com.intuit.ipp.services.DataService;
import com.intuit.ipp.services.QueryResult;

public class TestQBO {

	public static void main(String[] args) throws FMSException {
		String consumerKey = "...";
		String consumerSecret = "...";
		String accessToken = "...";
		String accessTokenSecret = "...";
		String appToken = "...";
		String companyId = "...";
		
		OAuthAuthorizer oauth = new OAuthAuthorizer(consumerKey, consumerSecret, accessToken, accessTokenSecret);           
		
		Context context = new Context(oauth, appToken, ServiceType.QBO, companyId);
		
		DataService service = new DataService(context);
		
		Customer customer = GenerateQuery.createQueryEntity(Customer.class);
		
		String query = select($(customer.getId()), $(customer.getGivenName())).generate();
		
		QueryResult queryResult = service.executeQuery(query);
	
		System.out.println("from query: "+((Customer)queryResult.getEntities().get(0)).getGivenName());      
	}
}

This code gets the first name and id of the first customer in your database, and prints it to stdout. Obviously just a starting point.

I am also not sure how long the accessToken and accessTokenSecret are good for, but this will actually give you command line access to your QBO data.

(Of course, I could have just used zapier, but that has its own limitations (limited ability to query data in an adhoc manner being the primary one).

APIs Business Web Applications | moore |

Running multiple versions of Cordova 3.x

cordova, the command line interface to the Cordova development framework, is a node package. npm, the node package manager, has the concept of a ‘global’ install and ‘local’ installs. Typical installs of the cordova command line interface instruct you to perform a global installation. That is what the -g in npm install -g cordova (from the docs) means. Installing globally means that one version of cordova is available to every user on that computer, and will be installed in a system directory (for example, /usr/local/lib/node_modules, on linux). If you upgrade that one version, everyone and every project on the system will be upgraded (or forced to upgrade, depending on your perspective).

If you want to run different versions of cordova for different projects, you have to install locally. That means that all the cordova code will be installed in a local directory, rather than a system wide directory.

Why might you want do this? Any number of reasons, but primarily because the relationship between your application and a particular version of Cordova is important.

  • If your application depends on bugs or feature behavior that has changed between versions, you could need to freeze your application at a given version of Cordova, at least until you were able to update your application and test it against a newer version.
  • You could have multiple applications that were developed at different times, and the older ones could crash if upgraded (or perhaps you don’t have the time to test against the latest cordova version).
  • Applications under active development may be at the latest and greatest version of cordova, while the others may be sitting at what was the latest and greatest when they were last modified.
  • A local install will let you test your application against a new version of cordova without committing a global install, which might affect other team members, other projects, or necessitate a downgrade if the new version has issues.
  • You might be working on a platform that is not amenable to being place in a virtual machine (like iOS) and yet still want to run different versions of Cordova on the same machine.

Below, I outline steps to follow if you want to have one project using Cordova 3.3 and another using Cordova 3.1. npm view cordova lets you view the available versions–typically you want the latest minor revision (3.3.1-0.1.2 is better than 3.3.0-0.1.0). These are steps for Android, but it would be similar for any target platforms. And these steps assume you have successfully installed the target platform tools for Android previously.

mkdir cordova3.3 # or cordova3.1
cd cordova3.3 # or cordova3.1
npm install cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 # or 3.1.0-0.2.0
mkdir project
cd project 
../node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova create test33 io.cordova.HelloWorld33 # or test31 io.cordova.HelloWorld31
cd test33 #(or test31)
../../node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova platform add android
../../node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.device

Don’t forget to add the device feature to your config.xml 

<feature name="Device">
    <param name="android-package" value="org.apache.cordova.device.Device" />
</feature>

You need to update the www/js/index.js file to display your Cordova version. This is only to prove you have different versions of Cordova running on the same machine

onDeviceReady: function() {
        alert(device.cordova);
        //app.receivedEvent('deviceready');
    },

Finally build the application and run it on your emulator:

emulator -avd avdname # start a previously created avd via the android command
../../node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova build android
../../node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova emulate android

Note that there should be no issues with running applications built with different versions of cordova on the same device–the applications are all sandboxed.

If you are often in this situation, you can create aliases that point to the correct version of the cordova command, since the results are indeterminate if you mix and match calls to different versions. For example:

alias cordova31='/path/to/cordova3.1/node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova'
alias cordova33='/path/to/cordova3.3/node_modules/cordova/bin/cordova'

Incidentally, I tried these steps out with the latest version of the android tools (version 19 of the Android build tools) with all four of the latest minor revisions of cordova: 3.0.10, 3.1.0-0.2.0, 3.2.0-0.4.0, and 3.3.1-0.1.2, and could only get the 3.1.x and 3.3.x versions to work. So another reason to do a local install is to perform a quick check to see if your platform installation is compatible with a given version of Cordova.

Do you have different versions of Cordova installed on the same machine?

Android Cordova CLI Phonegap | moore |

Finding company phone numbers

I ran into a situation recently at work where I was trying to find the phone number of a company. Checked the company site, including the footer and contact us page, and no phone number was available.

Now, I can see why, as a small startup (which is what this company was), you would not want a phone number available. But we were doing due diligence and I thought a phone call or two would be appropriate.

So, here’s a list of places to go to find a company’s phone number, if it isn’t available on their site:

  • Dun and Bradstreet. Especially useful if the company has an iphone app, because Apple requires DNB registration for a corporate developer account.
  • Facebook often has different information than a corporate website, if they have a facebook page at all.
  • The whois database sometimes has address and phone numbers associated with a domain.
  • The Secretary of State office, for whatever state they are in. This is where business documents are file, and is worth checking.
  • Twitter. Depending on your situation, you can also just tweet them directly: “@foo, I’m looking to call you, do you have a phone number”.
  • LinkedIn, to look for people who know people who work there. This may be more or less useful based on the spheres you run in and where you live.
  • The Wayback Machine, which lets you see how websites appeared at various points in time. This is useful if the company at one point had a phone number on their website, but now does not.
  • Use the above methods on any other names you have turned up during your search, as well.

It is simply amazing what you can find on the internet with some digging. So, if you are looking to find the phone number of that company, because you need to talk to them, don’t give up.

Technology and Society Tips | moore |

Google Spreadsheets as REST API sources

I recently built out a read only JSON API with a Google spreadsheet as the back end data source.

Why do such a thing? I didn’t need to modify the back end, but wanted to make the data available to other software. The people who maintain this data are very comfortable using Google spreadsheets. While I could have written a custom CRUD app, this didn’t seem like a good use of time when Google spreadsheets had served us well in the past.

How did I do this? I first of all created a sanitized spreadsheet, using importrange and regexreplace. This level of indirection assures me that if the source data changes, I can adjust fairly easily. If the user managing the spreadsheet wants to rearrange columns, I can adjust my sanitized spreadsheet easily.

Then I created a Google apps script and used doGet to respond to requests and the spreadsheet service to retrieve the data. The content service lets you serve JSON with the appropriate mime type. I used qunit for Google apps script (invaluable when you are working in the loosely typed javascript world and relying on cloud resources). I also worked with the parameters to build the querying needed for our application.

Then, in order to make it look like a normal API call, I fronted the script with Varnish and did some regsub magic in my VCL file (as well as some light authentication).

This approach has the benefit of keeping everything in Google’s cloud, and allowing you to access the spreadsheet data easily.

This approach has significant limitations, however.

  • Google apps scripts calls are slow, especially when accessing spreadsheet data. Using the cache service can help.
  • You cannot return anything other than a 200 response code. None of the other response codes are available.
  • The actual content is served after a redirect, so caching it at the Varnish level is difficult (though possible), and clients must be able to follow redirects.
  • Google changes the ip of the server running the script. This is not such a big problem, unless your version of Varnish only takes IP addresses in the VCL file, not hostnames. Like ours.

Was this a good idea? Well, it let me build out the API relatively quickly without affecting the users managing the data or finding any other place to put it. But we’ll probably move away from this due to the limitations listed above. One we’ve found particularly painful is the IP address switching, which usually only shows up in our automated testing.

We’ll probably start pushing the data daily (it doesn’t change all that often) to a local JDBC database using the JDBC service and use either RestSQL or DropWizard to generate an API for it. (RestSQL is quicker, but DropWizard lets us maintain format compatibility.)

APIs Google Apps Java Javascript | moore |

Guest posts about Cordova CLI

I’ve recently had the good fortune to write a couple of guest posts at some blogs to promote my book about the Cordova CLI.

First, I wrote a post on the CloudFour blog: “PhoneGap makes mobile development more accessible”.

But PhoneGap, a four year old project, now lets developers leverage standard web technologies such as CSS, HTML and JavaScript to build mobile applications. Designers who know CSS and HTML can create fantastic mobile friendly user interfaces (leveraging frameworks like Topcoat and Junior) and developers can focus on functionality and performance.

CloudFour is a consultancy based in Portland OR that my company has worked with in the past. They focus on the mobile web, and are very sharp.

Second, I wrote a post about hooks on Devgirl’s weblog: “Three hooks your Cordova/PhoneGap project needs”.

These hooks automate three common scenarios that will take place in almost any Cordova application–adding plugins to an app, switching between deployment environments, and adding custom icons and splash screens.

Write a hook anytime you have a build process that is tedious, repetitive, or required to build your app. Look carefully at any documented manual build processes. If you need to perform steps to build your app (copying icon files to various directories under platforms, for example), see if you can automate them in a hook script to make your build process quicker, easier, and more repeatable.

Devgirl, aka Holly Schinsky, is a developer evangelist for Adobe who has written about a wide variety of topics, including push notifications and Flex.

Cordova CLI Mobile Technology | moore |

Coursera online MOOC: one student’s experience with Stats 101.

I have been taking Statistics 101 from Coursera. This course is taught by a Princeton professor. I have been interested in stats for a while, but have never taken any classes. As a bonus, a work project I’m focused requires a lot of linear regression. (I’m using a library for the linear regression, of course, but wanted to understand some of the limits of linear regression before applying it for a business purpose.)

It was very easy to sign up for the class. I was a bit early, (the lectures are put up weekly starting on a given date), so I just added my email address to the wait list. When the class started, they emailed me and I registered.

It was free.

There are some changes coming to the university world. I have some friends who are professors and I’ve been sharing articles like this one and this one for years.

So, that was an additional reason to take the course. What would an actual online class be like?

The class is divided up into 12 weeks, 1 midterm and 1 final. Each week there are between 4 and 6 lecture videos to watch (the longest was approximately 20 minutes, the shortest is approximately 5 minutes), a lab video and a homework assignment. The lab typically examines the lecture concepts and puts them into practice using R, an open source stats tool/language. The homework is an untimed quiz that I have 100 tries to finish. Each quiz has 10 questions, some text input, some multiple choice, and typically is due 2 weeks after the initial lecture on the topic. I can complete the quiz later for reduced credit.

I’m over halfway through the course.

Am I learning something? yes. Definitely. I’ve learned basic concepts of statistics. There has been some handwaving on some complicated concepts and single letter concepts are occasionally introduced with little explanation (t, Z, and F values, for example), but this is an intro course, so I am unsurprised. I definitely have become comfortable with basics of R.

Am I learning what I would be in a normal college classroom? Nope. There’s been no collaboration (because of my time constraints, I don’t participate in the forums, which are the only form of collaboration I have seen). All R scripts are provided in the labs, which means you sometimes just cut and paste. Questions on quizzes are constrained by the online test format. Because I’m jamming it into my schedule, I don’t review the material as much as I should. There’s no opportunity to stop the instructor and ask exactly what he meant.

But….did I mention it was free? And that I’m not in college and don’t have the time for a normal college class?

If you are thinking of taking an online course through a MOOC like this one, here are some tips.

  • block out time to watch the lecture videos–I spend about 1-2 hours a week doing this. You can double book this with mild exercise (treadmill), sometimes. Sometimes the concepts were complex enough I could not multi task.
  • Coursera has a button on the video player to run the videos faster. I just started using this and find running the lectures at 1.5x is doable.
  • plan to spend some time on the labs and quizzes–I spend about 1-2 hours every week.
  • know what you want. If I wanted a deep understanding of statistics, I would probably need to spend an additional 2-4 hours each week working on understanding all the concepts covered in the lectures, and get an additional statistics book. (This one looks nice.). But I want a conceptual overview that lets me dig into third party libraries and learn the domain jargon enough to search the internet for further resources. This class is letting me do that.
  • get a tablet–these devices are perfect for consuming the lecture videos.
  • be flexible in your viewing, but try not to view a week’s worth of material in one day–that much academic knowledge transfer is no fun.
  • no credit is available. This might be an issue for some students.
  • be committed. It is very easy to sign up for these courses and then drop out, because there really are no consequences. But there are a huge variety of courses from a number of sources: udacity, udemy, edx, Khan Academy.
  • enjoy the free world class instruction.  Did I mention this was free?

All in all, I’m happy with this course and will come out of it more grounded in statistics.

From my experience in this class, I think that the business of teaching, especially introductory material that lends itself to video lectures, is going to undergo a change as radical as what newspapers have been through over the past 20 years. I don’t know if MOOCs will augment or supplant universities, but the scale and cost advantages are going to be hard to beat.

Lifehack Technology and Society Video | moore |

PhoneGap Usage Survey Results

A few weeks ago, I asked the PhoneGap google group members to fill out a simple usage survey. I was interested in versions of Cordova/PhoneGap used, as well as what device platforms were targeted. I had 30 responses over just under two weeks. Note that this survey closed on the 29th, before Cordova 3.1 was released.

Here are the results. (Some questions allowed multiple answers, so the number of responses may exceed 30.)

“What version of Cordova/PhoneGap do you mainly use?” A solid majority was on a modern version, either 2.9 or 3.0.
Which version of cordova do you use?

“What device platforms do you target?” The vast majority of respondents target iOS and, to a slightly lesser extent, Android. There are a smattering of other platforms being targetted.
what-device-platforms-do-you-target

“What versions do you have in production?” Every version of the 2.x line was represented. I think this shows that upgrading PhoneGap/Cordova projects used to be a pain (and, once an app is finished, there often times is no need to revisit).
Which versions do you have in production?

“Do you use Cordova or PhoneGap?” This is interesting to me because I think there is a lot of confusion around the difference. Most people were pretty clear.
do-you-use-cordova-or-phonegap

The results of this survey was interesting to me and I hope to you as well.

Mobile Technology Phonegap | moore |