The End is in Sight

As with many IT projects, this one has come down to the wire.  And, I have had to cut some scope to meet the deadline.  Tomorrow I will perform a demonstration, and I am happy with where I am and excited to move it to the next level.

More Progress

I have been working quite a bit on the web portion of the application.  It has been interesting getting everything working correctly.  I have had to build one page to handle all of the functionality, so as to avoid opening a browser every time I need to see a different view.  I have also needed to publish my changes to an external web server whenever I want to test the changes on the Android emulator.

In addition, I have added image buttons to make the progression feel a little more like an Android application.  One significant difference, however, is the background, which is a custom background I have used to make the application appear more like the site.

The last two pieces I have yet to finish are the integration of the bar code reading functionality and the installation on my phone and tablet.  A trabajar!

Interacting with Buttons

I'm working on getting the buttons to show different screens.  The next step will be to open the bar code reader and read in a value.

Detecting Mobile Browser

Now that I have a Web Part successfully loading a web page, I need to set up a web site for the web part to reference.  Part of this is detecting whether or not the browser is a mobile browser.  If it is, I need to re-direct to a special mobile version of the site.  This version will need to have one page that does everything with AJAX, as I believe any links will actually want to launch a browser window on the device, and that is not the desired behavior.  So, I found a script to check for a mobile browser.  Next step is to create the mobile version of the site.  Then, I will need to integrate the javascript with the Android application to use the barcode scanner.

Android Integration with HTML5

Today I am going to take a closer look at integrating the Java interface with HTML5.  I anticipate the crossover will occur when the user needs to scan a bar code.

Current Status

So, this will be my first Android application.  Currently, I have downloaded the SDK and looked at some samples.  I've also looked at PhoneGap as a possible way to compile my application for Android while building it in HTML 5.  Currently, I am leaning toward building a shell in Java that will interact with the Barcode reader but using HTML 5 for the interface.  I am going to go down this road a little ways and see how it goes.

Introduction

This is going to document the development process as I build an Android application for my senior project at Western Oregon University in Monmouth, Oregon.