Android Development: Approach for Agile Teams

Android Development :
Approach For Agile Teams
Anay Kamat
Consultant/Co-Founder
PresentSoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Copyright © 2007-2012 PresentSoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd., All Rights Reserved.

Android
• A great mobile platform
• Easy to learn SDK
• Lot of apps
• But…


How many iOS based devices do you know?

Now count the number of Android devices..


And then there are client
expectations!
• Android as a silver bullet
• Mobiles devices have smaller screens, thus
app development should be simple
• Static & Dynamic apps.. WHAT??
• UI has to be fancy or should match the theme
of their web app.


Development Anti-Patterns
• Most consider Android to be something like
iOS clone
– Often forget the existence of concepts like
“Intent”
• Most of the code is for fancy UI including
layouts and images for different screens and
orientations
• XML for purpose other than data transfer or
data markup


Android is not iOS clone
• Android supports collaboration between apps
• Android port of iOS app should be same as the
original iOS app… WHY??


Layout design with XML is good
But..
– XML was not created for that purpose
– Too verbose
– Does not directly interact with logical behavior
• Compare “rake” with “ant”
– Difficult to refactor


Fancy UI
• Consider Windows and OSX applications
– They use standard UI libraries provided by the OS
– Feature rich
– Makes it easier to use new application due to
familiar UI concepts
• Fancy UI for mobile app
– Requires more development efforts
– Adds learning curve for the user


All this adds to development
complexity
• Difficult to be Agile while developing
completely native application
• Alternative: Hybrid Approach
– Native code (Java): To power business logic and
backend services
– HTML &Javascript: For UI
– This makes refactoring easy for both UI and
backend.


Java
• Tried and trusted
• Object oriented
• Powers lot of enterprise applications
• But makes it difficult to write event based
code
– For e.g GUI Applications


Javascript
• Has some OO features
• Great functional language
• Good for developing event based UI apps


HTML & CSS
• Already in widespread use for building fancy
web UIs
• HTML5 takes it even further


But what about performance?
• Works great unless you are building games
involving heavy graphics


Example
• Lets take a look at a sample hybrid application
developed using Forge (Trigger.io)
– https://github.com/trigger-corp/forge-template-
list-and-detail


Observation
• Can help to quickly build hybrid apps with
Fancy UI
• But the file size of final APK is 2.9 MB
• What if we don’t make use of frameworks like
Forge/PhoneGap?
– Use the same HTML/CSS and JS
– Write your own JS bridge


Observation
• Took around 4 hours to develop underlying
native bridge
• APK file size : 93 KB (WOW)


Final approach
• Develop your great application using tools like
Forge/PhoneGap
– This ensures quick turnaround
– Existing talent and agile practices could be used
• Optimize it further (if required) using custom
native bridge


What’s next?
• Continuous integration
• Automated function tests


Thank You

About me
– Consultant/Co-Founder at PresentSoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
– Creator of Programming Language for students
• https://github.com/kamatanay/MayaLanguage
– Twitter: @kamatanay
– Email:anay@presentsoft.co.in
– Company Home Page: http://www.prsentsoft.co.in
– Personal Home Page: http://www.anaykamat.com


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