Latest posts from Codename One.
Blog
Insights, release updates, tutorials, and engineering notes from the Codename One team.
Building A Chat App With Codename One Part 4
This tutorial is starting to get interesting…. In this section we’ll go deep into animations, special effects, search styling and extracting contacts. In the previous sections we built the first form of the app, logged in and now we need to show the actual login form. Even more importantly we need to show it with style like this: (notice that you should see an animated gif above naturally we reduced quality to make it smaller but it still takes a moment to load). ...
Invite Friends, WebSockets, Windows Phone & More
We’ve released a burst of small new features that piled up during the code freeze and release cycle, we also have a couple of interesting 3rd party efforts such as an independent Windows Phone port and websockets implementation. But first lets start with Facebooks “invite friends” feature. Historically with the Facebook API you could just use the Graph API to query Facebook for the list of friends. This will return an empty list now and will only expose friends who are already using the app. You can use the standard share button or Facebook share both of which are great options to promote your app. However, Facebook also has a special native API allowing the user to invite his friends into the app… ...
Building A Chat App With Codename One Part 3
In the previous section we went over the login with Google process, in this section we’ll go over the login with Facebook. At this time we’ll skip the “invite friends” option since that is blog post all on its own and we can just add that functionality to the completed application. Facebook has a “get friends” API call that we can use, the downside of that is that it will only return our friends that have already joined the app so we won’t be able to contact anyone on an arbitrary basis. ...
Codename One 3.1 Now Live
We are thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Codename One 3.1! Version 3.1 is the first release in our fast pace release cycle of 4 releases per year. It brings stability, bug fixes and great new features to the table. The biggest highlights of this release are support for Java 8 and simplified certificate generation for iOS. Check out the list below for more details. Highlights Of The Release – Click For Details ____Java 8 Language Features ...
Building A Chat App With Codename One Part 2
In the second part of this tutorial we will cover the login process for Google and getting a unique id. We’ll try to write generic code that we can later reuse for the Facebook login process. But first lets cover what “signing in” actually means… When you handle your own user list and a user signs in thru registration, you can generally ask that user anything. However, when the user signs in thru Facebook, Google or any other service then you are at the mercy of that service for user details… This is painfully clear with such services that don’t provide even an email address by default when logging in. It is sometimes accessible in Facebook but only for users who didn’t choose to hide it. ...
Codefreeze For 3.1 & News
We just entered code freeze preparing for the release of Codename One 3.1. This is a one week freeze that is scheduled to end on July 28th after the release of the new version. In the next week we will only be working on critical bugs for stability and won’t add new features. After the release of 3.1 we will start aiming for 3.2 currently scheduled for the end of October as part of our new 3 month release cycle. ...
Tutorial: Building A Cross Platform Mobile Chat App for Android, iOS (iPhone) With Codename One Part I
In this tutorial we will cover the basics of building a good looking chat application with Codename One that will work on all mobile OS’s. We will cover everything from design to social network login and the actual chat behavior. This tutorial is for a hand coded application mostly because GUI builder tutorials require video and are thus less searchable. This project is created with the new Java 8 support to make the code simple and short. ...
Codename One 3.1 & Easier Iteration
Its been a busy month and getting busier by the moment, we are preparing for App Engines suspension of its blobstore service which will be coming around soon. This effectively means older crash report email functionality will be stopped for older apps (just rebuild the app for the emails to work again). We are also getting ready for Codename One 3.1 which we have tentatively scheduled for July 27th. This release will include a weeks worth of code freeze and will be the first of our new policy for faster release schedules. ...
iOS Certificate Wizard
So you have finished your app and tested it on the simulator. Everything looks good. You’re now ready to proceed with testing on your iPhone. You select the “Send iOS Debug Build” menu item and wait for the build server to work its magic, but then you’re faced with a notice that iOS builds require a valid certificate and provisioning profile. What a hassle! If you’ve done any iOS development (not just Codename One) I’m sure you’ve hit this speed-bump before. You can’t just test your app on your iPhone. You have to jump through a series of hoops imposed by Apple before you get the privilege of testing your app on your phone. You need to create an App ID with the necessary permissions, generate a certificate signing request, download your certificates, generate mobile provisioning profiles to register your iPhone to be able to test your app. And finally, you have to export your certificates into a format that can be used in Codename One. If you have a Mac, this process is annoying at best. If you don’t, then this process might be your show-stopper. ...
Java 8 Support
When we introduced Codename One initially we limited the API to CLDC level which is roughly a subset of Java 1.3, we then added support for a subset of Java 5 and we are now adding Java 8 language features! Thanks to some work from Steve and the great work done by the guys from the Retro Lambda project we were able to add compatibility to the major Java 8 features, most notably lambda expressions. This is highly experimental and some features might not work but so far it seems things are functioning rather smoothly. ...
Login Tutorials & Future Of Windows Phone
Facebook & Google login have been a source of a bit of pain mostly because of the obtuse and confusing documentation from both companies. Chen spent some time writing up tutorials for both Facebook Login & Google Login that should help you get started with applications that use such login options. Future Of Windows Phone I’ve been holding back on writing this before we have further information and can properly asses the situation. However… since MS is taking its time we’d rather discuss the future of Windows Phone once rather than all over the different forums/social and support channels. As you know we wrote roughly 3 different Windows Phone ports, the first targeted Windows Phone 7.5 (mango) which relied on functionality introduced in that version and immediately killed in 8.0! ...
Book & Continued Migration
Eric Dodji Gbofu has been working on a Codename One book in French for the past year and it finally came out! I’m still waiting on my copy mostly to show to French speakers we meet (I have a very hard time picking languages), I’m pretty sure its a cool book. Chen and I wrote the forward for the book, I trust Eric did a great job in it just like he has done with Codename One Fr. You can order the book either directly thru the publishers site (which is apprently the preferred way) or thru Amazon. ...