Digital learnings and other such nonsense…
Methodologies and Practices
A few little tweaks to automate Android instrumentation testing via Robotium & Maven
0105 days
Having recently revived an android project I haven’t opened in close to 6 months, I was left scratching my head as to why I couldn’t run any of my integration tests.
Thinking back, I remembered having problems getting robotium to instrument the clicking of a button, as simple as it sounds, theres a few little gotchas involved. Firstly, I needed to modify the test code to click on text, rather than a button, as it has been suggested by various users on StackOverflow that there does tend to be odd side effects when clicking buttons:
Deploying artefacts into your CloudBees maven repositories.
1306 days
If you’re like me, and have a fair few hobby projects on the go at any one time, you’re may want to take advantage of some of the free cloud services that are available out there. I’m particulary fond of the Maven repositories that CloudBees offer, as it gives you a safe and easy way to deploy your artefacts, whether they’re 3rd party libraries, snapshots, or even releases of your own software.
Head over to CloudBees.com and register an account, its free.
Asserting for a Toast message using Robolectric
1458 days
I’ve recently put together a few proof of concept applications, and since they’re “rough and ready” applications, a lot of the functionality is actually mocked, or given a stubbed implementation.
For example, I’ve got various buttons for things like “sign in with LinkedIn” or “Connect with Facebook”. Since its just a proof of concept, and those features aren’t really must haves, I stub them with a Toast message saying something along the lines of “feature not yet implemented”.
This gives the user the opinion that the buttons are there, functional, however the actions they take are not yet implemented.
A second app to launch; Agile Planning Poker
0464 days
After launching my first application onto the market back in March 2011, and amassing somewhere in the region of 15,000 downloads since it’s launch, I was eager to produce another.
I offered up my services at my work to develop an application to “test the water”, teaming up with the marketing director we created a simple yet useful application for agile project managers; planning poker decks.
Automating android application signing and zipaligning with maven
0614 days
This is something that has had me tearing my hair out for a few days now, I was pretty much border-line braveheart-ing my screen….
I’ve recently been on a little drive to try to maven-ize my projects. All had been going well until I needed to sign and zipalign my APKs. This post will help you conquer that barrier with the use of some maven plugins.
When using ant, I was able to simply enter keystore details into build.properties and just call “ant release”. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t carry across to maven, and you have to provide some more configuration.
Coupling and Cohesion, what you need to know for SCJP…
0629 days
Coupling and cohesion are two terms that often get mixed up, however they are actually really simple concepts, and the bonus is, they don’t just apply to Java.
Coupling
Coupling, in its purest terms, means “the degree to which one class knows about another class”. If one class uses another class, that is coupling. Coupling is everywhere, but the level of coupling varies.
Consider the following example of a tightly coupled set of classes:
Android; Continuous integration, all made lovely with Maven
2912 days
Lets face it, the eclipse ADT plugin is great for getting an android application up and running quickly, but if you want an easier way to get libraries, and a continuous intergration environment for robust automated testing and building, then maven is the way to go.
IntelliJ have recently released the Early Access Program to their version X of IDEA, this comes with Android support in the community edition, meaning we’re no longer bound to using eclipse for Android development!
