Author: agup

Upgrade Anxiety – We all have it

As I type this I can see an icon indicating 10 plugins need to be upgraded on my blog. Most are minor upgrades with tweaks and fixes that don’t really affect me. Some, like the WP Super Cache update, are enough to give me nightmares of my blog having serious technical issues.

Oh wait…hah! Well, I actually did totally mess up my blog a couple years ago. I thought simply installing the WP Super Cache update would automatically preserve all of my settings. If you aren’t familiar with this WordPress plugin, it essentially provides a performance boost to your blog by having a gazillion caching-related knobs, bells and whistles that you can tune.

Yes, I did research the topic of upgrading beforehand. And at the time, deja vu, I found very little useful information other than people recommending you should upgrade. Caveat Emptor. I ended up paying a tech support person $175 to fix my mistake and my blog was totally messed up for about a week.

Okay, so now I make sure to backup/export all my WP Super Cache settings . Yet I still get the heebie-jeebies every single time I get its plug-in update notification.  A few friends offered some not-so-tongue-in-cheek suggestions of why don’t I just learn about all the different settings and just experiment. “You have the skill(z),” they told me. I couldn’t argue with that.

What it really comes down to is “how” I want to spend my time. Like most members of the Esri Developer Evangelist team, I’m totally slammed at work and the outdoors keep me busy after hours and on most weekends. I don’t really care to learn the nitty-gritty intricacies of WP Super Cache and it’s hundreds of configuration permutations, along with all the other stuff I have to learn to stay on top of the latest technologies, APIs, etc.

In hindsight, now I know the WP Super Cache website doesn’t have a single link or tab that explains the various settings and configuration options. There are ten steps listed that don’t even begin to cover what happens if you change something, or what are the pluses and minuses of doing one setting versus another.

Lessons Learned:

  • You don’t have to accept all upgrades whether it’s your laptop, smartphone app, etc. I’ve gotten really good at skipping some. Others, like Chrome, happen automatically and even though they also occasionally introduce new bugs.
  • Note to self: Always, always back up your software, databases and settings.
  • Some upgrades deserve more attention than others. WP Super Cache is one of those upgrades that deserves your full attention to details. Spend time on forums reading and asking questions before hitting the upgrade button.
  • Some upgrades simply aren’t worth it. I’ve dropped a number of plug-ins that mysteriously started gathering information from my blog such as AddThis. I was running a protocol analyzer at the time and I noticed strange http requests to a 3rd party URL. Not only were the synchronous http requests slowing down my website, but when I visited the 3rd party website the details of what they did were extremely vague.
  • The last lesson learned is actually a note to software vendors that may be reading this. Too many upgrade notifications per month is very annoying. Unless you find a fatal bug, one upgrade per month is about my limit.

Esri Developer Summit – Washington D.C.

This year, for the first time, Esri has added a day of fun for our fellow geo-developers that work for the Federal government or who live and work in the Washington D.C area.  Tacked onto the end of the regular Federal GIS (Geographic Information System) conference, the Esri [Geo] Developer Summit will take place on Wednesday February 12, 2014. Consider it to be a full day of geo-geek coding goodness. If you are in the D.C. area and have requirements to do anything spatial or geo-related then you should definitely attend.

If you are already planning going to be there stop by and say “hi.” I’ll be presenting these three sessions:

–       ArcGIS API for JavaScript – Advanced Topics
–       ArcGIS API for JavaScript – Building Mobile Web Apps
–       ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android – Building Applications

Last but definitely not least, if you can’t make that, our full-blown geo-developer conference is called the Esri International DevSummit and it takes place in Palm Springs, March 10 – 13. Over 1500 developers converge on this desert oasis to deep dive into all things geo.

What all mobile web devs should know about PhoneGap

If you already building or looking into getting started with mobile web applications you should understand the basics of PhoneGap. The name ‘PhoneGap’ is widely recognized, and perhaps more widely misunderstood.

The nudge to write this article was born out of conversations where we stumbled across concrete limitations to modern responsive JavaScript libraries such as bootstrap and jQuery. Limitations that cannot be overcome by adding more brilliant functionality because some JavaScript capabilities simply do not exist within the browser today. Furthermore, other requirements were imposed by political realities, timeframes and expectations.

That’s where PhoneGap steps in. 

So what, tell me what PhoneGap does?

PhoneGap is owned by Adobe and it has an open source top-level Apache Foundation sister project called Cordova. I won’t bore you with its long and twisted history, you can read about it here if you want.

The bottom line is PhoneGap allows you to develop JavaScript mobile applications that have access to certain aspects of the native device such as writing data to a filesystem. Your web application is wrapped within a native mobile application container that gives you JavaScript access to native operating system capabilities beyond what the browser itself is capable of doing!

By native I mean iOS Objective C, Android Java, WindowsPhone, Windows 8, Blackberry 10, Amazon Fire OS and Tizen. Your JavaScript applications runs in a chrome-less browser that gives you special hooks to the operating system. You can also submit PhoneGap applications to the AppStore, Google Play and others.

Who uses this stuff, well you may be using a PhoneGap app from one of these online stores and not even know it. To mention a few: Southwest Airlines and many others.

What limitations can PhoneGap address that responsive libraries don’t?

If your requirements call for all or most of the following items, then PhoneGap is the correct choice for your project today. That may change as HTML5 continues to rapidly grow, but for now I’m sticking with the following bullet points. Stick with me and read through all of these before starting to throw out counter arguments.

JavaScript skillz. If you are an existing JavaScript shop, then PhoneGap leverages your existing JavaScript skills to access capabilities beyond current browser functionality without the need to have an in-depth understanding of Objective C or Java.

Sure, it’s easy to say you can hire expert contractors to develop iOS and Android applications, along with UX designers and testers. But, if your budget doesn’t include the capital costs for these folks and all you have is JavaScript ninjas on staff then the choice is easy.

Or, maybe you have genius-level developers that could easily and quickly spin up on all your need to know on ObjectiveC and Java Android. If this isn’t the case, and your timeframes and budgets don’t allow for this then you’ll need a fallback plan such as PhoneGap.

Access to camera.  Yes, you can currently access the camera on some web browsers today. However, the support on mobile browsers is still inconsistent, limited or non-existent. On the other hand, native device OS’s are expected to have access to cameras If they didn’t it would be considered a serious oversight. PhoneGap provides cross-platform mobile device access to the camera.

Read/write access to SD Card. Just to reiterate, this is both read and write access to a local storage device. Certainly there is a FileReader API in plain old JavaScript, but as far as I know there isn’t a FileWriter or its equivalent yet. If you need the write access to go along with read capabilities then you should be looking at PhoneGap.

[Correction Jan. 27, 2014] I mis-wrote. The FileWriter API exists however it has limited supported across browsers: https://caniuse.com/#search=filewriter. And, examples of it’s use can be found here.

AppStore or Google Play. If you have a requirement to submit your application to the app store then PhoneGap will help you get there. There is no way today for submitting a stand-alone web application for acceptance on AppStore or Google Play. Period. Some will argue that the need for using these online application stores is going away, but that’s a non-issue if you have been directed to meet this requirement a.s.a.p. and your job depends on it. If that’s the case, then PhoneGap will be your friend.

Is there anything else I should know?

Yes…First, PhoneGap is not perfect, but then again few software projects are perfect. You will need to install and know a few things about the native IDEs you want to support. If you want to deploy Android you’ll need to install Eclipse or IntelliJ. For iOS you’ll need to install XCode. Etc. You still have to compile a native project or you can try your hand at Adobe’s PhoneGap Build, which is a cloud based build system for PhoneGap.

It is confusing that there are two projects that share a common/similar code base: PhoneGap and Cordova. Also, Cordova’s documentation has typically been more up to date that Adobe’s. If you do your research you’ll find various performance complaints and bug issues (like I just said are there any software projects that don’t have these??).  Yet, overall it’s a great starting point if you have the needs listed above, and it’s much better than trying to start from scratch given today’s dramatically shortened delivery expectations.

You can absolutely still use bootstrap, jQuery and other JavaScript libraries within PhoneGap. There are caveats, of course, related to application life-cycle issue, navigation as well as App Store and Google Play user interface acceptance guidelines.

If you want to add functionality to PhoneGap because you find some critical thing is missing that you need for your project, the good news is you can develop a custom plug-in.

Last, I should mention Titanium Studio. It also lets you leverage JavaScript skills, with the primary difference being that it converts JavaScript into native byte code rather than just displaying it in a chrome-less view.  Plus it’s comes with its own IDE and MVC Framework.  I’ve never used Titanium so I can’t judge it, however I know people who do use it successfully and love it. It’s one more thing to consider that you should be aware of.

References

Cordova Documentation

PhoneGap Documentation

PhoneGap Platform Support