Open Source Development with App Inventor: Part 2 : Working with the Sources and Git

Show all videos of this series.

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: