iPROFS Technology Blog

As a web developer I often use front-end debugging tools like Firebug (Firefox) or Webkit Inpector (Chrome) to inspect or edit html & css and to run JavaScript (for example JQuery). Regular web pages shown by the browser can be inspected using such tooling as soon as the page is loaded.
With mobile devices however this principle is not (directly) possible. Of course you can run debug tooling opening the html as a file on your pc, deploy the application to a mobile device keeping your fingers crossed hoping it will run ok. It will be frustrating to see that web pages show and act different on a mobile device compared to the content being shown in a web browser on a pc. In this case the device is a black box and most of the times you have no clue what is causing the layout and behavior problem.
Searching the internet I have found a way to actually debug web pages on the mobile device using the browser of the pc. This article will show you on how to set this up, so that you can debug mobile web apps.

Read more…

It probably does not come as a surprise to you that mobile devices & mobile apps are hot. As more and more new mobile devices like smartphones and tablets come to market, the demand of apps increases as well. In 2011 the mobile devices market growth (tablets in particular) has exceeded the pc market growth by far. Based on the statistics of onlinemarketing-trends.com almost half of the smartphones sold in 2011 run Google Android. This post will focus on the Android platform and will give you a few easy steps for setting up, building and deploying a basic Android project using Maven and the Android SDK.

Read more…

Most of the web applications I worked on used Spring as glue between all the components. I don’t want to explain why we all use Spring but one of the main reasons is Spring gives us Inversion of Control. To have some glue in an android application I have used RoboGuice.  The project’s homepage is located at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/roboguice/. There is also a project called Spring Android, but this project doesn’t provide a IoC container for android. Read more…

If you have no Android experience yet, I recommend viewing the Android introduction movies first, they provide an excellent overview of the Android platform and the ideas behind it.

For the current application I`m working on I need to retrieve the location of the user. In this article I will explain two possibilities for retrieving the users location. The first one is through the network provider and the second one is through GPS.

Read more…