John M. Wargo

I spent some time this weekend working with the BlackBerry Widget (now inappropriately called WebWorks) development tools. They're pretty cool. I've never built web applications designed to run on device (rather than on a server) and didn't have any real experience with much client-side JavaScript, but it real easy after Scott Good kindly provided me with some sample code to work with. I created a couple of applications right away and learned a bunch while I did it. 

One of the things I've done on this site is write about how to build Web Services in Domino so you can consume them from mobile device applications. The Android and iPhone platforms don't support XML-based web services directly, so I had to build a JSON agent (a RESTful web service) for those platforms. Ultimately I need to document that work, I promised to at last year's Lotusphere, but haven't done it yet, sorry. Anyway, for the widget applications (and some work I have been doing in Dashcode) I leveraged those very same RESTful web services to build the application shown below. This is one of the application's I'll be showing at Lotusphere 2011.

I've also been working on using Dashcode to build mobile applications that talk to Domino data sources, I've created a sample application (shown below) that I'll also be showing at Lotusphere 2011.

Additionally, my publisher has been asking for an update to BlackBerry Development Fundamentals. One of the things that had been missing from the book is coverage for BlackBerry Widgets and the BlackBerry Push API's. Both of those technologies were released after my book was finished and I'd like to update the book to include them. Who knows, perhaps I will even put together a widget book. Stay tuned.

I've been interested in Chandler for a long time now. Chandler, if you don't know about it, is an open source project created by Mitch Kapor (one of the founders of Lotus). Chandler was supposed to change the world of calendaring in personal information management, but I don't think it ever did.

For Christmas, my boss gave me a copy of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software a book that chroniclized the creation of the project and associated program. The book was on my Amazon wish list, so it was great that my boss picked it up for me. I'd heard that the book was a hard read and being almost finished with it, I see why. The author tried to tell the story, but spent way too much time talking about other stuff that wasn't really related to what was happening with Chandler. It's like he wanted to write a book about this cool open source project, but wanted to write the book for non-developers. There are sections and chapters dedicated to providing some background on the technology and problems faced by development organization – I guess there to help the non-developer understand the background. Unfortunately, I'm really not sure why a non-developer would be interested in the book.

I downloaded the latest version of Chandler the other day and I'm going to poke and prod at it over the next few weeks. I just ordered some parts for a new PC build, so I'll setup a little sandbox and see what the program has to offer. I need to find a calendar I can share with my wife and ultimately my kids as well (as they get older). I probably need to take a look at Google Calendar as well.

I'll let you know my thoughts on Chandler when I finish my evaluation.

In preparation for Lotusphere 2011, I've been working on some demos for the session Rob Wunderlich and I will be giving at next year's conference. One of the things I want to be able to show is how to use Apple's Dashcode web application development tool to access Notes data plus how to build a BlackBerry Widget that does the same thing.

I spent some time over the last week or so poking and prodding at Dashcode and was able (finally) to get it working this morning. It's pretty easy to build an application that talks to a Notes database, but Dashcode does something to the URL you enter that breaks it when you actually try to deploy the application in the wild. I spent hours on it this morning and just couldn't figure it out. I tried all sorts of different things trying to get my data to show up in the application. It was only when I looked over on my Domino server that I noticed that there was an error on the console. A simple change and all of a sudden it worked.

To learn more, come to our session at Lotusphere!  Stay tuned for details.

I've been getting some briefings lately from Perfecto Mobile regarding their mobile application testing capabilities. I'd known a little bit about the market and identified some of the players in BlackBerry Development Fundamentals, but really didn't have a good idea of how it worked. From the briefings I learned more about the technology behind it and it's pretty cool.

They essentially place a bunch of active mobile devices in cradles in a data center then connect to them via a USB cable. Through a web interface you as a customer have access to, you can install applications on a device plus pull logs and other information from the device and interact with it. What surprised me was that they also offer a scripting language you can use to automate testing on the device; pretty cool. I still need to play with this directly, but as I understand it you can write scripts that poke and prod at the device, which I expected they could do through interfacing with the keyboard buffer and other API's the device manufacturers provide. You can even swipe through menus and click menu items , buttons and application icons. Again, I don't have all of the details, but apparently you can provide an image that the scipt uses to identify a menu item or application icon to click - as your script moves things around on the device, you can configure it to click when it finds the particular item you're looking for. So, if a menu item or application's icon position changes depending on what other applications are installed on the device, your script can still find it.

I'll be taking a real look at this solution after the holidays and I'll let you know what I find out.