Ember JS and Cordova Experiences and Plans

First off, sorry for the post being a day late! I've been swamped with work and a lot of personal stuff. I hope this post can be of use to some of you though!

Lately, I have been writing small phone apps that do some fairly useful stuff for me. Like keeping a track on my long term injury pain and other stuff of that nature.

The use these apps I've been using Ember CLI and Cordova for my technology stack. With these apps being small in nature, they can handle storing data with local storage without too much worry of it ever being filled up.

Ember CLI

Ember CLI is a command line interface for writing EmberJS applications. I've used this on a large scale EmberJS application that a team of developers and I had to create for a client. It gave us: folder structure, naming conventions and dependency management. It also adds a unit testing framework which we massively underutilized (our backend was written complete with TDD and we wanted to make the app so simple unit tests were pointless).

I have spoken about EmberJS and EmberCLI before, that post can be found here.

Cordova

Cordova is a set of libraries and a CLI for creating multiplatform phone apps. You may have heard of a variant of Cordova called Phonegap. Since I am only building apps for Android for myself I have no need for Phonegap as its major feature compared with Cordova is a build service provided by Adobe.

Ember CLI already has a plugin for Cordova development that can be found here.

Getting Everything Running

To get a dev environment up and running, I first installed and configured Ember CLI (which I discuss here). The next thing I had to do was to install and configure Cordova which I did by following the instructions here. I also had to manually install the Android SDK which I found instructions for here.

Once I got all of this tested I created a new Ember CLI Project and installed the Ember-CLI-Cordova plugin and added Android as a platform.

I then booted up a phone emulator and built the application.

It was all that simple.

In Progress

I am currently working a few projects with this technology stack, the most important one to me is a logger for tracking my log term back problems pain levels.

Another thing I am working on (and have almost finished) is an EV counter app to be used alongside playing Pokemon. Hopefully by the end of the week I will have this one deployed to the Play Store.

Future

In the near future I am going to be writing an Erlang Web API for my Raspberry Pi and plugging it into an Android app using this technology stack, I will be sure to write up my project with along with a load of pictures!

Thanks for reading!