Jenkins slave building android maven project

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Christoph Emonds Leave a comment

Today I tried to add an android project to our Jenkins continuous integration system. Since it is build by maven, I didn’t expect any trouble. In order to build android apps, maven needs a manual installed android SDK, so I logged into the dedicated jenkins slave (a minimal amd64 linux system with no X11) and downloaded the SDK for linux, using wget. Since no direct internet traffic is allowed in our company, I had to use the proxy server.

The first problem arose when I tried to download the different platforms and components for android. Usually you download these parts by using a graphical tool, included in the SDK, but since this machine didn’t have any graphics configured, this won’t work. It took me some time to discover the parameter 

--no-ui

, which runs the tool without a graphical interface. Now I tried 

./android update sdk --no-ui

, but since the machine hadn’t a direct internet connection, the download of the components didn’t work. My attempts of defining the proxy with the usual linux way by setting the “http_proxy” variable or setting the java system proxy information by adding “-Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy -Dhttp.proxyPort=80″ to the android script failed. Normally you would change the proxy information by using the graphical interface, but as told before it wasn’t available.

The solution I came up with, was using the proxy configuration file from a different machine. So I put the file androidtool.cfg containing the proxy settings in the /home/<user>/.android directory and voilà, downloading the platforms and components did work.

Nevertheless the maven build didn’t finish. Since the system was using amd64 libraries, the androidtool used by maven couldn’t find some libraries, it uses as 32bit versions. I just needed to install them with a short 

apt-get install lib32z1 lib32gcc1

and everything worked like a charm. :-)

Android, jenkins, Maven

Impressions CeBIT

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Christoph Emonds Leave a comment

Last week I visited the CeBIT exhibition in Hannover. I was there for the last 2 days, friday and saturday, luckily I had tickets for “free”.
The first event I attended was a speech on ways and services to use facebook for commerce. It was held by a company dot.Source and it was quite interesting. During the 20 minutes the lecturer gave a summary about ways to connect something like an online shop with facebook and harness the power of the social graphs of the individual user. I wasn’t aware about most the examples he gave but they showed up as some good starting points for digging deeper into this field. All of those services gave me the impression, that spikee (a project by some friends and me, right now in stealth mode) is on the right direction.

The rest of the day was filled with wandering through the halls and wondering about all those small asian companies selling the same mice, head phones and 3d glasses, next to manufacturers of glassesless 3d displays. There was one company exposing some speakers, demonstrating the sound (or should I say maximum volume?) with some old german summer hit:

I passed this booth several times, everytime with this song in my ears. If I had my booth next to this company I would have gone crazy.

Saturday I attended the CeBIT AppZone conference. I managed to see 3 keynotes, at first Sascha Lobo. He is a famous german blogger, known for his fancy hair style. In his keynote he talked about the iOS walled garden and the openness of android and why he thinks, openness in form of HTML5 will win this battle. He made some good points which enforced me to take a deeper look in android development.

Direct following was a keynote by the intel employee Peter Biddle in which he gave an introduction to the intel AppUp program. As far as I understood it’s an initiative to provide tools for platform independent apps. It was nice to see, but nothing which changes my mind.

The third and last keynote I attended was performed by Gustav Söderström, the vice president for products at Spotify. He presented the spotify application, which is basically some kind of subscription service for music, unfortunately not available in germany right now. Really impressing was the incorporation of social functions into spotify with shared playlists, dynamical playlists out of facebook walls etc.. He communicated the passion for music very well.

I left the conference after this keynote and went to meet my friends at the StarCraft II final of the intel extreme masters world championship, which was also being held at CeBIT. Although I don’t know much about the game it was fun to watch them play.

In my opinion CeBIT is only interesting if you know upfront what you want to see there. Walking through all the halls with the same stuff over and over can be very annoying. So I would give you the advice for next year: Take a look into the program and search for events you might like. If you find some, than go there. If you are only interested in new technology you better stay at home and watch some newscasts about it.

Conferences, Mobile apps, Spikee

The first App arrives App Store

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Christoph Emonds Leave a comment

The GigCrasher made it. It is available in the App Store under http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/gigcrasher/id420294176?mt=8. You could think, this would be the end of a story, but it seems the story had just begun. Unfortunately it started other than planned with some trouble, so I had to create a new version with a bugfix, which is right now waiting for the review by apple. As a bonus there are also new features included, namely facebook and twitter integration. The danger lies in devastating reviews in the app store, which can ruin your app forever. so you have to take an unplanned night shift.

But I was really surprised by some users living in the united states or in switzerland. I thought it would take longer to have users from other countries and outside my circle of acquaintances trying out my app. I see this as an incentive to steadily enhance the app. On tuesday I’m going to meet with a friend of mine for discussing a GigCrasher version for webOS. It would be great, to have the service available for other platforms, too. webOS does seem to be a lot smaller than the iPhone market, maybe this would be a chance to become a major player on one platform. There are also the first requests for a android version. Now is the question, what direction should be taken? New features for the iPhone or expansion to new platforms? Android and a webapp integrated in facebook do look as the most interesting things I could do, if you think about the technologies I could explore. I have the dim feeling, the near future will be more stressful than the last few weeks. There are also other projects which need their time after all.

GigCrasher, iPhone, Projects

GigCrasher project description online

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Christoph Emonds Leave a comment

While I’ll have to wait for Apple to review my GigCrasher iPhone app I found some time to describe this app here in the projects section. So if somebody is interested in the technologies used in the iPhone client or the JEE server, this is the place where he can find some information about them. If you have further questions or ideas for this, feel free and use the comments section to let me know.
Right now the site doesn’t contain much information, but I’m working hard to fill it with some interesting content. I have some ideas for interesting things to blog about, but right now I’m too busy with getting some of my projects on the site. I hope I’ll have some more time in the near future to write something about current topics.

GigCrasher, iPhone, Projects, Website , , ,