Phone gap android plugins

Android Plugins

Agenda
What makes me qualified to talk about this?
What is Phone Gap ?
How do I extend Phone Gap ?
Questions?
Let's Hack!

What makes me qualified to talk about this?

Currently top committer to PhoneGap-Android

Authored Various Plugins
BarcodeScanner – scans and encodes bar codes.
ChildBrowser – open remote web pages without interrupting your app.
FTPClient – pretty obvious
TTS – Text to Speech service
VideoPlayer – works around broken <video/> tag in WebView

What is Phone Gap ?

Phone Gap is...
a tool for building mobile applications using web technologies.
HTML for layout
JavaScript to access device functionality
CSS for rich look and feel
Standards based

How do I extend Phone Gap ?

Plugins to the rescue
Clean from an engineering perspective.
Lighter builds possible.
Adaptable for 3rd party extensions.
Portable to new platforms.
Secure only use what you need.

Plugin Native Interface

Plugin JavaScript Interface

Basic Example
Create you JavaScript

Basic Example
Create you Java Code

Basic Example
Add plugin to config file res/xml/plugins.xml
< plugin name =" HelloWorld " value =" com.phonegap.plugins.hello.HelloWorld " />
Call it from JavaScript: window . plugins . helloWorld . sayHi ( 'Hi Android' );

Callbacks
In your PhoneGap.exec() the first two parameters are the success and failure callbacks.
The success call back is executed when your Java code returns a status of PluginResult.Status. OK
The failure call back is executed when you return:
PluginResult.Status .CLASS_NOT_FOUND_EXCEPTION
PluginResult.Status . ILLEGAL_ACCESS_EXCEPTION
PluginResult.Status .INSTANTIATION_EXCEPTION
PluginResult.Status .MALFORMED_URL_EXCEPTION
PluginResult.Status . IO_EXCEPTION
PluginResult.Status .INVALID_ACTION
PluginResult.Status .JSON_EXCEPTION
PluginResult.Status .ERROR

Keep Alive
But what if you want to call your success call back multiple times.
Save the callback ID
this .c allbackId = callbackId;
Use the keepAlive parameter.
PluginResult result = new PluginResult(PluginResult.Status. NO_RESULT ); result.setKeepCallback( true );
Call the success function whenever you have a new result:
PluginResult result = new PluginResult(PluginResult.Status. OK , info);
result.setKeepCallback(true);
this .success(result, this .c allbackId );

Web Intent Plugin
Sometimes it isn't necessary to create a brand new plugin if you just want to call an intent.
The solution is Boris Smus' WebIntent Plugin.
window.plugins.webintent.startActivity(extras, success, fail);
Send an email for instance:
window.plugins.webintent.startActivity({
action: WebIntent.ACTION_SEND,
type: 'text/plain',
extras: extras
}, function() {},
function() {
alert('Failed to send email via Android Intent');
}
);

Questions?

Let's Hack!

Resources
More Info – http://www.phonegap.com/
Getting Started – http://www.phonegap.com/start
Mailing List / Google Group – http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap
API Documentation – http://docs.phonegap.com/
Wiki – http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/16494772/FrontPage
CODE – http://github.com/phonegap

Phone gap android plugins

by Simon MacDonald on Oct 08, 2011

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