Configure & Install Cordova Mobile Development Framework

Cordova is a life saver as it saves you from learning the native mobile programming languages. You can use your web programming skills to develop a decent looking mobile app. Cordova will package your HTML & give you an installation file that you can submit to app stores.

Cordova comes with many plugins to expose the native device functionality. If you intend to use the Camera, there is a plugin, same for device file system & storage & so on.

MAC or PC

Question to use a MAC or PC doesn’t even arise if you intend to develop for iOS. You will need a MAC to do any kind of Apple programming. PC will only be sufficient for Android or Windows Phone based development.

Go buy a decent MAC, if you are serious about developing mobile applications. I prefer to use the MACBOOK PRO as the main development machine to build both iOS & Android projects. However a PC would do the job if you just intend to get your hands dirty & explore the world of mobile application development.

Whether you decide to use a MAC or PC, the steps to install & configure Cordova are almost same.

Prepare development environment

You need to install the following components on your MAC or PC. Remember iOS development tools i.e. XCODE can only be installed on a MAC. XCODE installation package includes all the iOS bits & pieces so you don’t need to install the SDK separately.

Once these components are installed, remember to include these on your MAC’s path. How to do that, just Google & find out or you could simply execute the following statements every time you start a Terminal session. Let me know if you find a better way to do it.

# Add Android Tools & Ant to Path
echo $PATH
export PATH=~/Documents/adt-bundle-mac/sdk/tools:$PATH
export PATH=~/Documents/adt-bundle-mac/sdk/platform-tools/:$PATH
export PATH=~/Documents/apache-ant-1.9.4/bin:$PATH

Run following commands in terminal window to ensure you have everything ready:

  • “java –version” E.g. for Java 8, version number is "1.8.0_05”
  • “node –v” or “ant –v” to find out node or ant version
  • “adb devices” to find out any android emulators or physical devices currently running

Install Cordova

Well this is pretty straight forward & all of it is clearly documented on Cordova website. Just follow the article to install Cordova, create a demo project, add platforms & build.

# Install latest version of Cordova
# sudo is only required if you are on a MAC. Remove “sudo” if installing on PC
sudo npm install -g cordova

# Create a sample project
# Once created, you can open the project in XCODE or Eclipse
cordova create hello com.example.hello HelloWorld

# Change to sample project directory
cd hello

# Add platforms
cordova platform add ios
cordova platform add android

# Check platforms
cordova platforms ls

# Build iOS
cordova build ios

# Add plugin
cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.device
cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.splashscreen

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hybrid Apps using Cordova/PhoneGap: Ditch JQuery Mobile

I had a very difficult experience with JQuery Mobile & don’t recommend it to anyone due to reasons outlined below. Basically JQuery Mobile is only suitable for a rapid fire sample application that you could build in a week to impress the management. JQuery Mobile is very flaky & its event model is overly cumbersome e.g. I spent days figuring out a problem caused by Cordova scripts loading before JQuery or vice-versa. Furthermore to skin the app to your corporate branding, you will have to fight JQuery Mobile CSS all the way to end. This will result in lot of overrides & messy style sheets.JQM event model & CSSWe all know “deviceready” doesn’t fire in a browser. So what happens when you have tested your app in browsers & now ready to fire it up in simulators. I experienced lot of frustration to simply get the JQuery mobile event model right. Every time my Android simulator will start, my app will load all JQuery scripts before “deviceready” getting fired. After some…
Read more

SharePoint 2013 Search Service Activation Error

Image
I was configuring a new SharePoint 2013 Search Service when everything became stuck on service toplogy activation. It doesn’t matter whether I tried to configure Search using PowerShell or Central Administration the search service topology simply won’t activate. Search service & all its associated databases were created successfully but when I tried to activate a new search topology, created by cloning an existing topology, commands will fail. My SharePoint 2013 environment I was configuring a new Search Service Application on Windows Server 2012 Standard, SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint Server 2013 SP1. It was a single server SharePoint environment with SQL installed elsewhere. Servers have been joined to corporate domain & have Windows security features like Firewall etc activated.Error messages in ULS logsULS logs were filling up with following error messages:“Content Plugin can not be initialized - list of CSS addresses is not set.” (Note: This error starts to appear in UL…
Read more

VMWare Workstation - Assign a static IP address

Image
A virtual DHCP server, included with the installation of VMWare Workstation, assigns IP addresses in Host-Only and NAT network configurations. DHCP follows certain conventions when allocating IP address and sets aside a pool of addresses that it doesn’t assign. An IP address from this static pool can thus be assigned manually to a virtual machine, giving the VM a static IP address.Why static IP?Static IP address is a must have requirement if you are planning to setup an Active Directory domain. Server acting as domain controller must have static IP so that VMs, joined to the domain, can connect to the domain controller all the time. If the domain controller is set to get a dynamic address from DHCP then its IP address will change. This change in address doesn’t propagate to VMs joined to the domain, resulting in domain connection failure.DHCP IP address poolFollowing table outlines the conventions used by VMWare DHCP when allocating an IP address. The net value is the network number a…
Read more