Sakai OAE Native mobile app: almost the end.

It is almost the end of the summer of code, (time flies!), so this post will be just a quick summary about how the project is going on, because I want to use all the remaining time to finish some code, add new features and write documentation.

So this is just a sneak view, to keep the community update. Again, I must begin this post thanking my mentor Carl Hall, for his hard work, he has asked every question that has arisen and also he gave me some freedom to make take some decisions. So, thanks Carl! I am really proud to work with you :)

Ok, let’s focus on what matters. If you read my previous post (Why should I develop native mobile application (sometimes)?), one of the bad things about writing native applications is the maintenance, when I wrote this post I have already complained about the problems of implementing functions in one platform that are completely different in the other. I have been stuck in a lot of device specific problems, I tried my best to take benefit of the iOS and Android user interface, so the layout is slightly different in this two apps.

I am going to quickly enumerate things that are already implemented:

• Skeleton application for Android : It has grown up a lot since last time I talk about it. It has 3 tabs for the main features in Sakai OAE that they match with the 3 main tabs on Sakai web version. Also it has the navigation menu inside “You” tab. All the strings than you can see are internationalized.
• Skeleton application for iOS: idem in IOS. It took me a lot of time make it work. As you could see in the demo tabs are in the lower part of the screen, to use the UI specific tabs, and make the application easier to use for iOS and Android users.
• Authenticate users in Android and iPhone: last time I wrote I had users could authenticate themselves sending their credentials in Android. Right now they can do the same also in the iOS application.
• Store and manage Sakai URL in Android: Carl and I were thinking than write down every time the Sakai URL was really tedious. So we add a new first view where the user writes the URL, the app checks if it’s a valid URL and store it inside the device. In Android it is stored inside the SharedPreferences of the app, so we can get the URL every time we needed it.
• Store and manage Sakai URL in Android: same for iOS. Here the URL is stored in a singleton class inside the NSUserDefaults.
• Calling a web service and show data in Android: Although the authentication was already a web service, we have achieve to call the Me Service with the user credentials, get back the Basic Information inside a JSON Object, parsing it, populate java classes and showing the information inside the Android App. Apache has really useful libraries to do this.
• Calling a web service and show data in iOS: again the result for iOS is the same, but the implementation has nothing to do, here I used JSONFramework to parse the data and Objective-C classes to manage the connection. This web service is inside a thread so it runs in background.
  
  

And since a picture is worth a thousand words, I have uploaded a small demo video to youtube.

I hope you find this project interesting. Thank you for your time and I’d be waiting for your comments.