OSCON Titanium Tutorial

Before You Begin
Prerequisite Software
Latest iPhone SDK
Android SDK with 1.6 and any later SDKs installed
Titanium Developer
Getting Started Guide
http://developer.appcelerator.com/doc/mobile/get_started
Linked in tutorial notes at http://oscon.com

Native Mobile Applications USING Open Source

Want to give this talk?
Your local user group
Your company
To your wife and kids
Package includes:
Slides in various formats
Example code
Resources for presenters
http://github.com/kwhinnery/MeetupPack

Today’s Agenda
Titanium Mobile Overview
Hello World and Project Walkthrough
Building Titanium Apps: Fundamentals
Code By Numbers: Oh Snap!
Where To Go From Here
Questions and Answers
Independent Hacking

About Me
Kevin Whinnery
Engineer/Platform Evangelist
http://kevinwhinnery.com
Twitter: @kevinwhinnery
Web developer by trade and training, lover of JavaScript and open web technologies in general

About Appcelerator
Open Source Software Company based in Mountain View
~25 employees and growing
Developing Titanium for about two years, with Mobile coming in the last year
95% Developers

About You New To Mobile Development Mobile Dev Veteran

Either way, you’ve come to the right place.

Amazing Mobile Platforms

Which is great and exciting!

...only how do we target all these cool platforms?

Well, you could build native, but...
Which platforms do you choose?
How many codebases do you want to (or even can you) support?
How long will it take to build native on N platforms?
How much effort will be duplicated?
What if you bet on the wrong platform?
Who writes the code? Hire out? Retrain/retool yourself or your devs?

The Web Is An Option...
...and should be preferred when feasible
Mobile browsers are progressing fast and converging around WebKit
But there are limitations
Native apps are inherently more capable than web apps
Native apps run faster and smoother on resource constrained devices

Ideally, we build cross-platform native apps...

...but we don’t want to “write once, suck everywhere”* *Loren Brichter, creator “Twitter for iPhone”/Tweetie

X-Platform Requirements
Target multiple platforms from a single codebase
Apps must feel like they belong on the platform
Apps need to perform like native
Bonus: Open source and extensible
Bonus: Use skills we already have
Hmmm, I wonder if he has a specific technology in mind...

Enter Titanium Titanium is an open source framework for building native mobile (or desktop) applications using open web technologies (JavaScript - optionally HTML and CSS)

Titanium Key Facts
Open Source (Apache 2.0)
Professional Services, SLA Support, Training, and Analytics available from Appcelerator
Titanium Platforms
Desktop: Win32, OS X, Linux
Mobile: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, webOS (soon)

Titanium Projects
Titanium Developer (1.2.1)
Titanium Mobile SDK (1.3.0)
Titanium Desktop SDK (1.0.0)
Versioned separately, different release schedules
We will focus on Developer and the Mobile SDK

Titanium Features Native UI Location APIs Local and Remote Data Social APIs Rich Media APIs Open Source and Extensible Integrated Analytics Development Tools Real native tables, tabs, sliders, and views Native Maps, Compass, and Geolocation Local SQL Database, Lightweight Key/Value Store, XHR Integrated Facebook Connect and YQL Local and streaming audio and video, media recording Extend Titanium with custom modules in native code Baked-in analytics APIs to measure results and behavior Develop and distribute your app for multiple platforms from a single tool

Who Uses Titanium?
NBC Universal
PayPal
MTV
Anheuser-Busch
Computer Sciences Corporation
Intridea (Oil Reporter)
100s of Titanium apps hitting the stores each month (should soon eclipse 1000/month)

Titanium Architecture
Desktop is HTML focused
Can use other scripting languages
Mobile: JavaScript interpreted at runtime
JavaScript API >> native APIs

What Titanium Mobile is not:
Not a native wrapper around a web view
However, you do have a web view component for HTML/CSS UI if that is your preference
Your JavaScript code is invoking native APIs for UI and other native functions
Think MacRuby/Hot Cocoa on the desktop or some AAA mobile games which ship with a Lua interpreter

Example

Titanium Developer
Manage and run Titanium applications
Package applications for distribution
Run on a device for testing
Manage Appcelerator account

Demo: Hello World!
Creating a mobile project
Mobile project structure
Editing code, adding UI widgets to the app
Deploy to simulator

Demo: Kitchen Sink
Example Code
Living Reference Document
Demonstrates API coverage

Questions So Far?
Titanium as a product
Titanium capabilities
About Appcelerator

Titanium Fundamentals
A Titanium application is a JavaScript program that is interpreted at runtime on the device
app.js defines the root execution context of the app
Note that we are not running in a browser
We use the WebKit KJS JavaScript engine (iOS) or Rhino (Android/BB)

Titanium JavaScript API
Organized into logical namespaces
“Titanium” (or just “Ti” for short) is the root namespace for all Titanium functionality
A few other odds and ends in the global space
setTimeout/setInterval
alert
JSON

Typical App Composition
A single window or stack of windows
Tab Group containing many windows
Windows contain views

Windows and Contexts
Windows are the top level container for Titanium applications
Applications usually consist of one window or several windows in a tab group
Windows usually create new execution contexts
Execution context == A unique JavaScript symbol space
Such windows are “Heavyweight” windows
Can also create “Lightweight” windows (for apps that run in a single context)
3

Demo: Contexts
New Project - Two Tabs with “Lightweight” windows
Switch to contain urls and contexts
Symbols not defined in other contexts

The View Hierarchy
Views are the building blocks of Titanium UIs
Specialized views: table views, image views, map views, etc.
Views can contain child views, which are positioned relative to the parent
Layout Options: Absolute, vertical, or horizontal (currently iPhone only)
Vertical layouts require height to be set

Custom Events
Use for cross-context messaging
Events are received across all ACTIVE contexts
Windows not yet open do not receive events
Use also as an inversion of control mechanism
Publish message when the database has been updated
Publish message when contacting a server
Using pub/sub messaging is very useful in a component-oriented framework like Titanium

Demo: Custom Events
Now lets use custom events in our new app
Events can have a data payload
Remember that events are only received in active contexts

Hey, what about layouts? We’ll demo that later in the tutorial...

Cross-Platform Development
Not all UI is available across platforms
Titanium != “Write Once, Run Everywhere”
We try to enable native apps that look and feel like they were created in Objective-C or Java
Also note that even cross-platform UI components (like table views) will render differently cross platform
Cross Platform testing is critical during dev cycle

Cross-Platform Tips
iPhone/Android subdirectories
Ti.Platform.osname
Display height/width
OS version
Check Out Kitchen Sink Platform example
10

Questions?
App Composition
Runtime environment
UI Layouts

“Code By Numbers”
Demo App: Oh Snap!
Condensed version of Snapost
Source: http://github.com/kwhinnery/Snapost
App Features:
Multiple Window/Tabbed UI
Properties API
Camera and Local Photo Gallery
Upload to remote web service (TwitPic)
Want to develop and deploy to a device in the space of a few minutes

A Nicer Version...
Our example will be somewhat basic
For a nicer example with better styling and slightly more robust handling of images, check out Snapost
3D iPhone transitions, laser noises!
http://github.com/kwhinnery/Snapost

iPhone SDK Users
Will need to download build to address iOS 4 issues that is not in basic 1.3.0 release
Nightly Builds:
http://builds.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
Let’s go through install of “latest and greatest” build...

0: Create “Oh Snap!”
New Project via Titanium Developer
Grab new icons from Glyphish
Configure tab icons, new windows/execution contexts
http://gist.github.com/481044

1: Arrange Basic UI
Create necessary buttons, image placeholders, text labels
Arrange using vertical layout
Check out styling options

2: Persist Un/Pw Combo
Pre-populate text fields with Properties
Persist un/pw combo
Add event listener to save button

3: Select Media
Open Photo Gallery
Show Camera
Dynamically update ImageView source file

4: Upload Image
Create HTTPClient object
Open a POST request
Upload image media and Twitter update

5: Deploy to a device
Demo: Deploy via Titanium Developer
On your own, provision your system for development on device
Android == super easy
iPhone... not so much
Video Tutorial:
http://vimeo.com/10278960
All Appcelerator Videos:
http://vimeo.com/appcelerator

Recapping Oh Snap!
< 200 Lines of code
Persistent App Preferences
Fully native UI (ugly, but see Snapost for the pretty...)
Integrated camera/photo gallery
XHR Upload to remote server
100% Cross-Platform

But wait, there’s more!
Animation APIs
Social Networks
Custom Module Development
iPad Development
HTML 5 and CSS 3
Explore Desktop!!!

Resources
Community Q&A
Reference Docs (new getting started guides just finished)
Premium Support (Pro Subscribers)
Kitchen Sink and Demo Apps
Dev Blog: Tutorials, Updates from dev team, developer-focused content
Follow @appcelerator for news and updates

You Call It
Questions? Comments?
Need Help? Let’s hack your project!
Want to get in contact with someone regarding X, Y, or Z? I’ll direct you to the right folks.
Anything else at all
Kevin Whinnery http://kevinwhinnery.com http://twitter.com/kevinwhinnery IRC (irc.freenode.net): #titanium_app

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OSCON Titanium Tutorial

by Kevin Whinnery on Jul 19, 2010

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OSCON Titanium Tutorial — Presentation Transcript