Table Of ContentIN ACTION
M A N N I N G
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Advance Praise for Flex Mobile in Action
A must-read for anyone thinking of doing mobile apps. It’s simple enough for the novice
and deep enough for the pros.
—Ken Brueck
Director of User Experience, Protoven
Flex Mobile is cross-platform development at its best.
—Andrew Grothe
Developer, zedIT Solutions
An excellent introduction to the powerful ability of Flex and AIR to target
multiple mobile platforms.
—Kirsten Schwark
Senior Software Developer, iDashboards
Great cutting-edge techniques for mobile apps developers!
—Bill LaPrise
Owner/Developer, c3works
A very detailed and complete look at cross-platform mobile development
with Flex. Lots of great examples explaining the whats, hows, and whys
of mobile Flex development.
—Brian Genisio
Senior Software Consultant, SRT Solutions
Very handy code snippets, both for novice and day-to-day development.
—Fabien Nicollet
GIS Software Engineer, Business Geografic
It gets you building multi-platform real-world mobile apps in no time while
acquainting you with best coding practices and techniques.
—Alexandre Madurell
R&D Analyst Programmer, KIT digital
Get mobile applications running quickly with Flex on AIR. Very good for
learning, with extremely reusable examples.
—Doug Warren
Software Architect, Java Web Services
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Flex Mobile
in Action
JONATHAN CAMPOS
MANNING
SHELTER ISLAND, NY
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Cover designer: Marija Tudor
ISBN 9781617290619
Released as eBook only, May 2012
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brief contents
PART 1 GETTING STARTED........................................................ 1
1 ■ Getting to know Flex Mobile 3
PART 2 MOBILE DEVELOPMENT WITH FLEX ............................. 15
2 ■ Get going with Flex Mobile 17
3 ■ Persisting data 54
4 ■ Using your device’s native capabilities 78
5 ■ Handling multiresolution devices 128
PART 3 ADVANCED MOBILE DEVELOPMENT.............................155
6 ■ MVC with mobile applications 157
7 ■ Architecting multiscreen applications 218
8 ■ Extending your mobile application 246
9 ■ Effective unit testing 267
10 ■ The almighty application descriptor 291
11 ■ Building your application with Flash Builder 310
12 ■ Automated builds using Ant 324
iv
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contents
PART 1 GETTING STARTED ...............................................1
1 Getting to know Flex Mobile 3
1.1 Learning key terms 4
1.2 Deciding between native and cross-platform 4
1.3 What’s Flex Mobile? 6
What language am I coding in? 7 ■ What runs our code? 7
1.4 Hello World 8
Prerequisites 8 ■ Creating a new application 9
1.5 Introducing a running example 11
The roadmap for our example 12 ■ Public APIs and Rotten
Tomatoes 12 ■ The RottenTomatoesAS3 API 13
1.6 Summary 14
PART 2 MOBILE DEVELOPMENT WITH FLEX .....................15
2 Get going with Flex Mobile 17
2.1 Starting up your application 18
Creating a TabbedViewNavigatorApplication 19
The views 21
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vi
2.2 Running your application 23
Desktop run/debug configurations 23 ■ Adding a device
configuration 27 ■ Device run/debug configurations 29
2.3 Building your first application views 29
Navigating your application with the ViewNavigator 29
Providing context with the ActionBar 35 ■ Updating the main
application 37 ■ Creating the browse view 38 ■ Creating the
list view 42 ■ Creating the search view 48 ■ Creating the
details view 50
2.4 Persisting navigator state 52
2.5 Summary 53
3 Persisting data 54
3.1 Storing data with the local shared object 55
Creating a local shared object 57 ■ Interacting with a local shared
object 57
3.2 Storing data using SQLite 60
Connecting to SQLite 62 ■ Creating a SQLite table 63
Reading from SQLite 65 ■ Writing to SQLite 67
Deleting from SQLite 68 ■ Updating a SQLite record 69
Adding public methods 70 ■ Integrating with
SQLPersistenceManager 71
3.3 Simpler data storage with PersistenceManager 72
Interacting with PersistenceManager 73 ■ Implementing
IPersistenceManager 74
3.4 Summary 77
4 Using your device’s native capabilities 78
4.1 Creating a device capability testing app 79
Creating a new application 79 ■ Creating the menu view 80
Application descriptor file 82
4.2 Taking the same picture three different ways 84
Using the CameraUI the cross-platform way 86 ■ Using the
getCamera() method 88 ■ Accessing the device’s camera roll 91
Camera permissions 94
4.3 Monitoring movement with the accelerometer 94
Listening to the accelerometer 95 ■ The values returned from the
accelerometer 96
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4.4 Finding out where you are with geolocation 98
Adding the geolocation permissions 98 ■ Getting location from the
geolocation sensor 99
4.5 Including the entire web with StageWebView 102
Connecting the StageWebView with the stage 103 ■ Setting the
StageWebView location 104 ■ Setting the StageWebView
content 105
4.6 Using gestures the right way, right away 105
Setting your touch input type 106 ■ Using gestures 107
Using touch points 109
4.7 Texts, emails, maps, and phone calls 112
Sending SMS messages with SMS 113 ■ Sending emails with
mailto 114 ■ Navigating with Google Maps 115 ■ Making a
phone call with tel 116
4.8 Recording sound with the microphone 117
Adding the microphone permission 117 ■ Connecting to the
microphone 118 ■ Recording and playing back audio 120
4.9 Responding to OS-specific inputs 122
Android operating system buttons 123 ■ BlackBerry bevel
gestures 125
4.10 Summary 127
5 Handling multiresolution devices 128
5.1 Automatic scaling 131
Diving deep into automatic scaling 131 ■ Enabling automatic
scaling 132 ■ Considerations with automatic scaling 133
5.2 Using media queries in CSS 133
Starting up the CSS file 134 ■ Adding color 136 ■ Overriding
CSS based on DPI 138 ■ Adding in hardware-specific CSS media
queries 141
5.3 Images for multiscreen projects 144
Organizing your images for multiscreen projects 144
Using the MultiDPIBitmapSource with an image 145
5.4 Overriding DPI returns to customize applicationDPI
values 146
Finding the capabilities values for each device 146 ■ Overriding
the RuntimeDPIProvider 147
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5.5 Splash screens 148
Basic splash screen 148 ■ Multiresolution splash screen 152
5.6 Summary 154
PART 3 ADVANCED MOBILE DEVELOPMENT....................155
6 MVC with mobile applications 157
6.1 What is Robotlegs? 161
How Robotlegs works 163
6.2 Hitting the ground running with Robotlegs 169
Creating the context shell 169 ■ Connecting the context and
starting up the application 171
6.3 Separating your services 173
Creating your public methods 174 ■ Transferring your result and
fault events 177 ■ Mapping your service events to service
commands 181
6.4 Refactoring your data into models 186
Creating your model shell 188 ■ Including the models in your
context 195 ■ Creating your state model 196
6.5 Splitting your code into views and mediators 201
Creating the view 202 ■ Wiring up your mediators 204
Adding handler methods 206 ■ Connecting and disconnecting
your mediator 207
6.6 Application upgrade 210
Changing the main application 211 ■ Building the
ApplicationMediator 214
6.7 Summary 217
7 Architecting multiscreen applications 218
7.1 Laying out a multiscreen application 219
Hub library 220 ■ Spoke applications 220
7.2 Libraries 221
What’s a Flex library? 221 ■ Setting up the library 223
Creating your base context 225
7.3 Android application 227
Setting up your Android application 228 ■ Customizing the
view/mediators for Android capabilities 231
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7.4 Creating your QNX-specific application 233
Setting up the QNX application 233 ■ Customizing the view/
mediators for QNX capabilities 236
7.5 Creating your iOS-specific application 240
Setting up the iOS platform application 241 ■ Customizing the
view/mediators for iOS capabilities 242
7.6 Summary 245
8 Extending your mobile application 246
8.1 Making money by adding ads 246
Not all platforms support ads 246 ■ Not all ad systems are created
equal 247 ■ Be honest or be punished 247 ■ Integrating with
Google AdSense 248 ■ Creating the HTML page 250
Integrating ads into your application 251
8.2 Native extensions 254
Including native extensions 255 ■ Using a native
extension 259
8.3 Useful user tracking 259
Using Google Analytics for Flash 260 ■ Plugging in
tracking 262 ■ Integrating with tracking events in an
application 265
8.4 Summary 266
9 Effective unit testing 267
9.1 What is unit testing? 267
Test-driven development 268 ■ Test-behind development 268
Flying blind 268
9.2 Testing terms 269
Test suite 269 ■ Test case 270 ■ Test method 270
Assert 271 ■ What do you unit test? 271
9.3 Synchronous unit tests 272
Creating a RendererUtil class 272 ■ Testing a utility class 273
9.4 Asynchronous test for event-driven tests 279
Testing a service call 279 ■ Writing the tests 281
9.5 Running tests from the IDE 283
Using Flash Builder to run FlexUnit tests 283
Creating an application to run FlexUnit tests 287
9.6 Summary 290
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