Welcome to another video of the Open source development with App Inventor series. In part 3 we will go through the sources by reviewing how new Components are created. We will see some of the main parts of the Twitter component, and what parts of the system need changing to make sure that everything is kept in sync.
The image that opens the video was taken from Coding Horror, a fantastic blog about software development.
In the next video we will be talking a little bit about the Android lifecycle, how it affects App Inventor apps, and how the codebase hooks into the methods provided by the Android SDK. Catch you then!
In this part of the Open Source Developement with App Inventor series, we'll see how to work with the sources. My first (and only) attempt at recording it was getting too long, so I decided to divide this part in several videos (3 in total).
In the first video (titled Part 2), we'll see the documents that are the base of all the actions explained in the video. These are mainly two, How to build App Inventor from MIT sources, and Developing App Inventor with git and github. As mentioned in the video, if you just want to run App Inventor locally, and do not expect to be changing the sources at all, then the first document is enough. If you want to work a bit on the sources, make some changes, or create your own components, then you need to read both documents. And here is the first video:
In the second video (titled Part 2 and a Half), we see how to sync with the remote or upstream repository. Git is a distributed version control system. If you have worked with a system like subversion before, Git might be a bit difficult to grasp at the beginning. Here's a good comparison article between centralised and distributed source control. If you haven't gone through the Git resources highlighted in previous videos of this series, please do so now. In this video we will see how we can get our github Fork synchronised with the main repository maintained by the MIT team.
The third video (titled Part 2 and Three Quarters) shows how, once the sources have been built, the system can be locally launched. As explained in previous videos of this series, there are two main servers that you need to get running to play with App Inventor locally, one is the server portion of the appengine project that backs the Designer interface, and the other one is the Build Server that creates the apk files for your projects. Here's how you can do that:
In this second part of the video series we are going to explore the basics of the system, at a very high level. A description of the different projects and what they do is given.
The links for this part are:
Where to find stuff?
Main OSS Website: http://appinventor.mit.edu/appinventor-sources/
I am a big fan of tech video series. If I recall correctly, railscasts was the first one I watched, probably at about the same time that I started following TED talks (although the latter are not really a 'series' in itself, and not always about tech). Much more recently, I have very thoroughly enjoyed the AngularJS videos in egghead.io, and I tend to watch as many full conferences as I can.
No surprises here then if I tell you that I have started recording my own series, right? The topic is App Inventor and Open Source. I have no idea how often I'll get a chance to record a video, but if you want me to talk about an specific part of the project, I'll do my best to get it online. I will always try to keep them shorter than 10 minutes (that's the format I generally enjoy more), so some topics will be divided into multiple videos. I do not intend to do any editing, so at times, you'll see me doing some weird stuff and getting it all wrong, but I won't be cutting stuff off, mostly for the sake of learning. Feel free to shout to the screen (as I do... at times...) or leave a comment, and I'll do my best to get it right in another video.
I am going to start with the basics, but this isn't really a 'Learn Java' kind of series; there are millions of resources out there to learn Java and Android, so I doubt we need yet another one (and I also doubt I can do a better job!). So if you know a bit of Java (or some other language), and you are familiar with the command line, and building programs from it, you are all set for the series... so let's get started!
Part 0: Before you start
Here are the links in the video:
Where to find stuff?
Main OSS Website: http://appinventor.mit.edu/appinventor-sources/
