The other change belongs to the Twitter messages. I realized that I use Twitter more and more often to share certain links or give brief news. Because those messages are not enough to fill entire blog articles, I decided to give the Twitter message more weight. That’s the reason why they are now visible straight on the startig page of www.experiencedwebprogramming.com.

I hope you enjoy the changes as much as I certainly do :)

Further links, helpful books, a community calender and way more can be found there. Check it out!

(via Andrés Valloud)

At first it looks like waving the white flag, but reading it until the end there is a programmatic solution to hack the proxy settings:

System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "myProxyHost");
System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "myProxyPort");

This indeed seems to be the solution to get your application communicating via a certain proxy. But note: these settings then are only valid in your application.

That I do learn developing with the Android SDK wasn’t only intended for my private use but also for a project I am thinking of at work. For doing the first steps I wanted to create an application privately which maybe could also be published later on. I would further on use the experiences to create more clean and precise code for my project at work.

So far the theory. My private application should deal with Amazon webservices which furthermore should be used to build something like a price-watcher application. It is great because I had a great and reasonable use case which would make me learn the SDK specific environment, as well as operate with web services in Java and also on mobile devices. This idea came to me before reading the terms of use of Amazon web services. Amazon unfortunately doesn’t allow using the web services on any mobile devices if not explicitely granted. Of course I wrote an email to the support and of course I did not get a positive answer.

So I finally decided to gain my knowledge through my work project. You might understand that I cannot talk about the project itself but I can tell you that it also includes leveraging web services for receiving and manipulating data. So I first had to solve the issue of finding a library to use for SOAP web services. After googling a little while I came to the conclusion of using ksoap2 for Android. Using the tutorial shown in this video (via) I decided to stick with the given example first. Which means involving a publicly available web service to simply convert a temperature value from Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa.

And there I was with the biggest struggle since I began working with the Android SDK. Developing at work means developing behind a proxy. Which additionaly means that I have to solve the problem of getting the Android emulator using proxy settings. While the given solution of the Android Developers Guide did not lead to solving the problem, I next stick the idea of injecting the database directly with the proxy settings. Let me tell that this solution as well as trying to set the proxy address from within the emulator image.

I finally ended up with this thread. You can find those complaint all over the internet. But I figured a little detail: I used the SDK Version 2.1 which obviously has the problems with proxy settings. Using an emulator running on Version 1.5 indeed lead to succesfully creating request over the proxy.

Of course this is not my final solution but at least I can go on developing and gaining experiences. After solving this major issue I can now go on leveraging ksoap2 in order to create SOAP requests with both simple as well as complex datatypes.

As soon as the proxy support changes even for later SDK version, I will go with the newest solution as well as post it here to keep you informed.

1. Gather information about tutorials, beginners guides etc.
I guess the best resource for starting with Android are the pages published by Google itself. But additionaly I want to have a printed version handy. Therefore I decided for “Hello, Android: Introducing Google’s Mobile Development Platform (Pragmatic Programmers)” (Amazon link).
And while waiting for the book to arrive at my place, I just go on with the next steps.

2. Getting the environment ready
Of course the most important download to get is the SDK. You can simply get it from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html.

Following the “manual” I downloaded Eclipse in Version 3.5 (Galileo). But when I was about to install the SDK I got my first problems: If you open the “SDK Setup.exe” in your downloaded archive, you will be prompted to choose the right files to get updated. Unfortunately I didn’t see anything and instead got an error message that I should change the Settings. So I clicked the message away, went to the Settings tab of the application and under “Misc” I activated the option “Force https://… to be fetched using http://…”. That solved my first issue.

But it went straight on when I wanted to install the ADT (Android Developer Tools). If you follow the given instructions you’ll see that you should simply use the “Install Software” menu entry of Eclipse. So far so good … I again struggled at the point of not seeing any component to choose. And again I had to change the recommended URL (https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/) to use the one with http (http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/). After a long long wait I could finally install the ADT.

My next step should be to simply run a test project and see it doing his duty in an emulator. By the way: that’s for me the most important fact of the mobile SDKs! Give me the chance to emulate the device I am developing for. With the SDK you have to create those emulated devices first: Therefore you open eclipse. Go to the Preferences and add the Android SDK path first. Now you should see the following menu entry: Window -> Android SDK and AVD Manager.
When clicking on it, you can see a window where you can add AVDs. AVD is the abbreviation for Android Virtual Device. Simply click on new, set your wished name, target (basically the SDK API version you want to develop for) and make your choice with the other settings and your done.

If you now create your first Android project in Eclipse, you simply click on “Run” … an emulator window opens and you can see something fantastical like a black screen with a given string which is probably manipulated through your created code.

Now it’s time to play with the given samples and tutorials and of course to dig into the pages of the book I ordered.

While he was giving me the permission via Email – and I am very thankful for that – he now did the same publicly. I am glad that he decided to share his work! As soon as I have a little more spare time I will dig into the code and try to port it to Pharo. Could be cool to use it in connection with Seaside!

But please bear with me I do not have that much of time – especially with christmas coming soon …

But it is not only helpful for Seaside but Smalltalk in general: http://soek.goodies.st/.

Both links landed on my bookmarks list immediately.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to dig into it. But after my holidays, I definately spend some time going through it!

So if you want to follow my account, simply go to www.twitter.com/expwebprog.