Question

As far as I see every time I make a change, for example the value of a configuration variable, I have to

• Make a copy of the change in each project (webapp, Android, IPhone, etc.)
• Build each project
• Distribute each project (besides the webapp)

I have found PhoneGap build which seems to be a great solution for the mobile part. But it’s still beta and it doesn’t solve everything. I still have webapp’s code, which is not exactly the same.

Do you know techniques, tools or tricks, which help to improve this process?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

We are currently developing a web/Android app using PhoneGap and Sencha Touch (iOS is coming soon). So far our approach is as follows:

• We have one project per platform plus several additional toolkit projects.
• One platform is “primary”, web in our case. This is what developers mainly use to develop and test the app. We’re using jsTestDriver for testing.
• During the build, the app is packaged for web in the first step. We’re producing several artifacts here (.war file, tests in a .jar file).
• “Secondary” platform projects do not include the source code. It gets unpackaged and copied to the right places when projects are built. This also includes tests from the primary platform.
• Platform projects contain some additional code – normally only testing code, app code itself is currently cross-platform (not sure if it will stay this way).

So we’re doing it mainly through advanced build scripts. We’re using Maven for web and Android. iOS is coming soon (into our work, I mean), so we’ll be looking for some sensible build tool there too.
We’re building our projects using Hudson continuous integration.

What I have to admit is that this whole environment (multi-project Maven builds, JSTD, multi-node Hudson) is a hell of a setup, took quite an effort to figure it out.