An initial walkthrough and initial of how rapiddev works and why it is a must have tool for every titanium mobile developer.

1. Develop Titanium apps
at the speed of the web!
Welcome to RapidDev!
Welcome to RapidDev!
Develop Titanium apps
at the speed of the web!
Matt Apperson - Apperson Labs founder
May 10, 2014
appersonlabs.com

2. Who Am I?
• Owner of Apperson Labs
• Formerly an engineer at
Appcelerator
• Born from PHP
• Father & husband

3. • We work white label with
agencies 75% of the time
• Mobile is our life blood
• Specialize in Titanium
• Native? Yea we do that!
• NodeJS is great too!
• Lovers of open source
Who we are

4. Some companies we work with…

5. Agencies we partner with…

6. For too long…
Mobile dev SUCKED

7. We had some options…
!
‣ Live reload
‣ Near instant deploy
‣ REPL to test
‣ Easy to share
‣ Freely available and open
source
!
!
‣ 5 sec - 1+ min reloads
‣ deploy takes hours
‣ Compile code
‣ TestFlight is the best?

8. What if native/Ti had the
Flexibility of web

9. Don’t we have this already?Don’t we have this already?
TiShadow
LiveView
‣ The original instant reload
‣ JS / compiler based
‣ Has REPL
‣ Is free/OSS
‣ Provided by Appc
‣ JS + native
‣ Integrated with studio
‣ Support provided via Appc platform
RapidDev
‣ 100% native
‣ Use any unit testing framework
‣ ZERO JS code changes/insertions
‣ is free/OSS
‣ Feels, acts & behaves exactly like using Titanium

10. How RapidDev works
•Builds a base native app with any required modules, and
ALL the core Ti code
• Uses a module to change file paths to read from the
document directory
• Opens a socket connection to your dev computer
•Files transfer over on save and reloads the app, clearing
caches
•Use ANY testing framework, even your own

11. How RapidDev does NOT work…
•No JS was changed/hacked/replaced
•No requests had to be made to the server on file load
•No performance loss
•No extra abstraction
•Just like a regular native Ti app. Making testing &
debugging easier and more reliable

12. How to install RapidDev
$ npm install rapiddev -g
*You might need to use sudo…

13. Live Reload

14. So easy to use
$ ti build --p iOS --rd

15. Want to stop using RapidDev?
$ ti build --p iOS

16. Dev Directory

17. No need to add/remove files…

18. Unit Testing

19. Running unit tests
ti build --p iOS --test
ti build --p iOS --test --rd
ti build --p iOS --test “login”

20. RapidDev is not perfect (yet!)
1) No android support…
2) No REPL
3) Only works via the Ti CLI
4) It does not have it’s own logo :(

21. What comes next?
More then live reload…

22. ANDROID SUPPORT!!!
•Harder then expected to do in
native Java
•Will use a modified “fastdev”
•Will match RapidDev for iOS
features

23. CLI / REPL SupportRapidDev.next $
• Be able to do things like:
$ ti exec file.js -p iOS
• Run arbitrary code such as
$ ti repl
> alert(‘run code in active app’);
• Some native modules need a full app to
test or need to run on device…
$ ti full-build
• Run RapidDev in server only mode
$ rapiddev start

24. RapidDev (Current Protocol)
File change
Copy file
Reload app
All files changed
Copy one file
Reload app
Vanilla Titanium App CoffeeScript & Alloy Apps

25. RapidDev.next (Improved Protocol)
All Titanium Apps
File change
Copy file
Reload app
Are there more files?
NO
YES
Confirm
receipt

26. To instantly return to
where you were
*Checkout the Apperson Labs / Codex Labs workshop tomorrow at 4:30

27. RapidDev “Instant Return”
ti build --rd --return “Rating”

29. Develop Titanium apps
at the speed of the web!
Welcome to RapidDev!
matt@appersonlabs.com
appersonlabs.com
@appersonlabs / @mattapperson