Latest posts from Codename One.
Blog
Insights, release updates, tutorials, and engineering notes from the Codename One team.
New Skins, San Francisco Font and more
One of the big issues with some new users who picked up Codename One was the lack of up to date device skins. We made several attempts in the past to improve this situation but these ended up as half measures at best. Last week we addressed some of the core problems that made it hard to add new skins and as a result we now have 33 new skins that are far better than anything we had before. ...
New Rest Calls
I really like the newer Rest API’s Chen added a while back. They are ultimately far more convenient than the ConnectionRequest API’s for most day to day development. In fact I used them almost exclusively in the Uber clone app. As a result of that I added a few useful enhancements and capabilities. If you are not familiar with the API it works roughly like this: Map<String, Object> jsonData = Rest. get(myUrl). acceptJson(). getAsJsonMap(); This will request using an HTTP GET method from the url. It will set the accepts header to JSON and parse the response. ...
TIP: Stop Editing
Device only bugs are the worse. You need to go through a device build and reproduce/rinse/repeat. Thankfully these bugs are rare but sometimes they just hit you smack in the face. One such problem occurred when I was debugging a transition on Android related to a login form. I would move between a Form where I had the keyboard open to one where it was closed. This created a nasty effect where the keyboard folded leaving a black space and the transition played out about that black space. ...
Xcode 9.2 Mode
Every time we switch a version of xcode in the build servers things go haywire because of minor behavioral changes from Apple. Over the holidays we started a long and painful migration to xcode 9.2 which required an update to the Mac OS versions on our servers. Thankfully this wasn’t as bad as the old xcode 5 to 7.3 migration where the old build code literally stopped working… ...
Progressive Web Apps
PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are an extremely hot topic right now, and Codename One apps are very well suited to being deployed this way. In case you haven’t been following the PWA buzz, the idea is that it’s a web app that behaves like a native app. When they are first loaded in a user’s browser, they behave like a normal responsive web app, but users can install them to their home screen just like native apps. At which point, they can behave as “offline-first” apps. Parts of this have been available for quite some time, but the concept of PWA brings a lot of little things under a single umbrella. ...
Uber Clone Clarifications and Xcode 9.2 Update
The other day I sent out an email alert mentioning the Uber clone release and price change for the course on the 30th. I also mentioned upcoming modules in February which caught some attention. I wanted to clarify some things and answer some of the repeat questions I’ve been getting. I also have a lot of updates to make so I’ll include some of those below. Uber Clone I uploaded 33 lessons into the module by now which you can see in the main course page. I’m almost finished for this part. ...
Meltdown and Other Updates
I’ve been so busy I just don’t have time to blog as much as I should. I do hope next month will be better in this regard (more on that below) but right now I have to make an important announcement. There are new chip vulnerabilities I’m sure you heard a lot about specifically Meltdown & Spectre. Thankfully we are at a layer that shouldn’t be impacted by these issues but we need to update our servers and will be doing so over the course of the next few days (possibly more as patches get updated). ...
Travis CI Integration
We’ve just added support for Travis CI in your Codename One projects. Travis can be set up to automatically test your project (i.e. run unit tests) on a variety of different platforms every time you commit changes to github. There is a wiki page with full documentation of this feature, but the general idea and workflow are: Enable Travis CI for your project via Codename One settings Push your project (including .travis.yml and .travis directory, which are created for you when you enable Travis) to Github. ...
Uber Clone Trickling Down
I hope you all had a great time over the holidays, I was working a lot but was able to enjoy the relative quiet of the holiday period to get some stuff done. There are a lot of new features I’d like to update you about and I will over the next few weeks (albeit slower than usual). Despite my best efforts I still didn’t finish the full Uber clone app course but I’m getting REALLY close. There isn’t that much work left to do though and I’m starting to trickle out the module lessons. ...
Updates and Happy New Year
Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, happy new year to all. All of us here at Codename One hope you have a lovely vacation if you are taking one. As I mentioned before we are still working but only partially due to the holidays. We still got a lot of things out and have a lot more coming up. I will blog more about it in January. In the meantime, I’ll leave another teaser for my current project… ...
Keeping Busy
I’ve been remarkably busy with the Uber clone application. Cloning Uber proved to be pretty easy but writing the material about it is much harder so I’m taking longer than I anticipated to finish everything. I’m already up to slide 200 and I’ve barely started… I think I might end up with more than 1,000 slides in this module! I’m pretty optimistic about the results though and hope you will like it too. This did give me a chance to look deeply into the Uber application and I have a lot of insights into the current state of app development. E.g. the similarity between the Uber app on iOS and Android is amazing! ...
Updates and Holidays
Before I go into the details a quick announcement, we need to update some of our push servers. We will have a short amount of downtime on Sunday December 3rd around 8AM GMT. This update should be very fast and barely noticeable but it might impact some push message deliverability for a short period. Some of us will be on vacation around December but I’ll personally still work during the month. However, I won’t post regular blog updates until mid January as the traffic during the Christmas/new year season is relatively low and I’m afraid some important updates might slip between the cracks. We do plan to push out a plugin update version 3.8.1 during this time as we have some new features and bug fixes pending. ...