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

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 logs ULS 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
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 pool Following table outlines the conventions used by VMWare DHCP when allocating an IP address. The net value is the netwo
Read more

SharePoint 2013 Intranet, Extranet & Internet architecture

Image
For quite some time there has been a picture in my mind of one on-premise SharePoint 2013 farm used for hosting company’s Intranet, Extranet & Internet sites. Whenever there was any discussion of this shared farm idea, the immediate question raised was about security. Would you host your public website on infrastructure located inside corporate firewall? What are the security implications of an attack on Internet site, would that bring down Intranet too? In this post, I would try to address all of these concerns to give you some guidance about whether using one farm solution is a good option. Use cases Let’s formulate a typical business request using a fictional company name “Contoso” for building their Intranet, Extranet & Internet on SharePoint. Intranet : It comprises of corporate portal, team sites & employee personal sites. Employees working at company offices use their desktop computers to access these sites. Company has 2000 employees & currently use Shar
Read more