Android Development With IBM i? You Bet!
By Tami Deedrick
Have you been reading Joe Pluta's series on how to develop for Android and IBM i?
In the first article, Creating Your Android Environment, he focuses on downloading and setting up the components needed for your Android development environment: Java, Eclipse, the Android SDK and the Android emulator.
In the second article, Building Your Android Application, Joe uses your newly created Android development environment to build a first application. This is the business version of a Hello World application; it lists hot orders.
The third article, Extending Your Android Application, builds on your business application by using the APIs provided by the Android operating system. In this case, you will launch the contacts application to let the user call or email the sales rep for one of the orders.
In the fourth and final article, Integrating Your Android Application with the IBM i, the application gets a major UI enhancement in the form of a scrollable, extendable list and then is modified to get the orders from an RPG program on the host.
So have you tried it? Are you running into trouble? Did this springboard you to another application? You can discuss your thoughts and experiences in the comment section of this blog. The author, Joe, will be participating in the discussion as well.
I'm getting an error when running this in android 4.0 because from what I understand network access is no longer valid during the initial thread. Trying to figure out how to use AsyncTask isn't easy for a noob.
Posted by: Art Tostaine | Jan 03, 2012 at 05:43 PM
I am on Android 4.0 and from what I understand network activity is no longer allowed during onCreate.
I'm trying to google a solution and found AsyncTask but I'm having difficulty (noob).
Any help appreciated.
Posted by: Jack Tucky | Jan 03, 2012 at 05:44 PM
Hi! I haven't tested under 4.0 yet, so I haven't run into the problem. Can you post a link to where you got the information that network activity is no longer allowed in the initial thread? I'll look into it as soon as I can.
Joe
Posted by: Joe Pluta | Jan 04, 2012 at 08:20 AM
By the way, I'm not surprised that the issue has come up. It's a basic premise of GUI design that you shouldn't execute long-running tasks on the UI thread, and clearly my simple code violates that rule. The problem with small examples is that you can't always cover all the architectural niceties.
I will try to update the program to use the AsyncTask class and maybe even write a followup article to show some more about how threading works.
Posted by: Joe Pluta | Jan 04, 2012 at 08:32 AM