Saturday, March 10, 2012

Campfire client for Android

My current pet project is Fireside TalkCampfire client running on Android. It is now available on Android Market Google Play. I have a lot fun there and learned a lot of things.

Here are some of them:

  • A few activities with AsyncTasks to perform network communication was good enough start.
  • Later I changed that to activities + content provider to persist the data between sessions.
  • The next important step is to add a service to run asynchronous updates.
  • Resources are expensive on device so I decided to build a server side to watch for updates in chats and notify the device through C2DM
  • The backend on server is now simple HTTP server running on Grizzly. (It is a pain to resolve dependencies of their Maven project to get it set up with pure Ant build).
  • I played a little bit to set up security for the communication between device and server.
  • Then I updated my Samsung Galaxy Tab to Android 3.2 to see some new bugs. So I went to fix them. Including bunch of threading violations.
  • The plan now is to add few more features like transcripts, search, file attachments and improve the user experience on tablets.
I can post some more detailed comments on these later. At the moment I am busy with all this work. As a side effect I have various ideas how to improve development support in NetBeans because obviously I am using NBAndroid plugin.

No comments:

Post a Comment