Hello there!
In collaboration with coLab, we organized a Android Development Course!

You can check for details here.

Get your ticket now, there are some discounted “Early Bird“ tickets available!

coLab in collaboration with PinApps.com,
AndroidGreece.gr, GreekAndroidApps.gr and AllinOneTraining.grpresents “Android Development 101″ a four week intensive training course offering the skills necessary for professional development of Android applications.

Android  is the leading platform for smartphone and tablet products around the world.  This  course introduces you to development for the Android OS, allowing you to create applications that can run on millions on mobile devices.

This course begins on June 4 and will comprise 2 x 3hr sessions per week for 4 weeks. Participants will have access to online material and video content as well as written notes and practical exercises.

Seats are limited so get your tickets now.

There are discounted “Early Bird“ tickets available.

All attendees get a free copy of “Programming Android, Java Programming for the New Generation of Mobile Devices, By Zigurd Mednieks, Laird Dornin, G. Blake Meike, Masumi Nakamura as well as a disount coupon for all O’Reilly books.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course based on a real development sample project, students will be able to:

• Professionally use software development process in Android applications.
• Professionally use APIs in Android SDK to develop applications.
• Understanding about Mobile programming on other platforms (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry).
• Understand about concept of a Design Pattern and how to apply it in Android application
• Achieve essential soft skills for workplace: communication skill, presentation skill, work etiquette.

Prerequisite

• Already have programming experience in any language or Java development experience is preferable.

Training methodolody

• Each training session is a combination of lectures and hands-on lab exercises to provide the optimum learning experience.
• A development sample project is assigned from the start of training course.
• Trainees are provided necessary soft skill courses for professional working .
• Actively trainees are required to investigate, refer to the references, documents before class.

Course outline

1. Basic software engineering

• Requirement
• Design using UML: High Level Design, Detail Design, Test Plan & Test Cases.
• Implementation: Prepare for Implementation, Coding & Unit Test, Integrate & Integration Test.
• Testing: Testing Process, Testing Phases, Blackbox Testing Techniques Overview.

2. Android Application Development

• Android Overview ( platform architecture, versions, installation guide, …) and create application, application storage.
• Android activity (Activity, Passing Data Between Views).
• Android UI (Layout, Control, Intent, Event Listeners, Menu, List View, List Adapter).
• Call Web Service & data operation with SQLite database.
• Using Thread in Android, Data Storage.
• Map and Location Based Services, Market Store.
• Design Pattern.
• Overview about Mobile programming on other platforms (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry).

3. Soft skills

• Communication skill, Presentation skill, Interview skill, Work etiquette.

4. Project assignment

• Group discussion & Project report.

About the Trainer: Konstantinos Polychronis
[LinkedIn Profile]
Founder & Chief Software Engineer at PinApps.com
Head of Mobile at BugSense.com

Konstantinos is a graduate of the Network Systems and Data Communications of TEI of Messolonghi, department of Nafpaktos. With a long history in development, Konstantinos started programming in QBasic, Visual Basic, mIRC Scripting and then occupied himself with Windows Mobile development on his first PDA. His first professional contact with
mobile device programming was at Intracom, while his first contact with Android was in 2007 for his diploma project. Konstantinos founded the Greek Android Community (AndroidGreece.gr) and built his first Android applications while was working at ByteMobile as Android software engineer.

Konstantinos also worked at BeeTech and ADDs and by the end of 2010, had his own mobile software development company PinApps.com which he still runs now. Since the summer of 2011 he as also joined BugSense, a real time bug tracking service startup.

Konstantinos has presented at conferences and meetings such as DroidCon 2011(London), the 12th Infocom Conference,
Athens Digital Week ’09 & ’10, Fosscomm ’09 & ’10 and has been applications judge at HTC’s Greek Android Developers challenge and has appeared in various media and websites with regard to his expertise.

It never gets easier… You just get better.

lol

/**
* Copy the content of the input stream into the output stream, using a temporary
* byte array buffer whose size is defined by {@link #IO_BUFFER_SIZE}.
*
* @param in The input stream to copy from.
* @param out The output stream to copy to.
*
* @throws IOException If any error occurs during the copy.
*/
private static final int IO_BUFFER_SIZE = 4 * 1024;

private static void copy(InputStream in, OutputStream out) throws IOException {
   byte[] b = new byte[IO_BUFFER_SIZE];
   int read;
   while ((read = in.read(b)) != -1) {
      out.write(b, 0, read);
   }
}

This is one of my favorite tips and I also consider it a good practice.
How to close any java input or output Stream.

/**
* Closes the specified stream.
*
* @param stream The stream to close.
*/
private static void closeStream(Closeable stream) {
if (stream != null) {
   try {
      stream.close();
   } catch (IOException e) {
   Log.e("IO", "Could not close stream", e);
}
}

The price of being a sheep is boredom.
The price of being a wolf is loneliness.
Choose one or the other with great care.

You never know when you will need your old skills ;)

In my model I had a Date field. It seems that Elastic Search could not convert it to a valid format of it’s own and I got the following exception:

org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.MapperParsingException: Failed to parse [added]
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.core.AbstractFieldMapper.parse(AbstractFieldMapper.java:309)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.object.ObjectMapper.serializeValue(ObjectMapper.java:569)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.object.ObjectMapper.parse(ObjectMapper.java:441)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.DocumentMapper.parse(DocumentMapper.java:567)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.DocumentMapper.parse(DocumentMapper.java:491)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.shard.service.InternalIndexShard.prepareIndex(InternalIndexShard.java:289)
	at org.elasticsearch.action.index.TransportIndexAction.shardOperationOnPrimary(TransportIndexAction.java:185)
	at org.elasticsearch.action.support.replication.TransportShardReplicationOperationAction$AsyncShardOperationAction.performOnPrimary(TransportShardReplicationOperationAction.java:428)
	at org.elasticsearch.action.support.replication.TransportShardReplicationOperationAction$AsyncShardOperationAction$1.run(TransportShardReplicationOperationAction.java:341)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)
Caused by: org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.MapperParsingException: failed to parse date field, tried both date format [dateOptionalTime], and timestamp number
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.core.DateFieldMapper.parseStringValue(DateFieldMapper.java:343)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.core.DateFieldMapper.parseCreateField(DateFieldMapper.java:280)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.core.AbstractFieldMapper.parse(AbstractFieldMapper.java:296)
	... 11 more
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid format: "2012-03-01 00:00:00.0" is malformed at " 00:00:00.0"
	at org.elasticsearch.common.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormatter.parseMillis(DateTimeFormatter.java:644)
	at org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.core.DateFieldMapper.parseStringValue(DateFieldMapper.java:338)
	... 13 more

Since I didn’t want to search the Date field with Elastic Search at the first place, I found out I could set elastic search to ignore that field and since I’m only interested in searching the “name” and the “description” fields, I could add the @ElasticSearchIgnore annotation at all the other fields.

Now Elastic Search doesn’t bother to parse the Date field nor the others. To be honest, I didn’t found a solution for the Date conversion, but, hey, it works this way ;)

One feature I would like to see (I didn’t found out anything) is to be able to explicitly tell only which fields I want to be searched and exclude all the others.

If you don’t know what elastic search is, you should read about it immediately.
Almost everything you are developing or may develop contains a search section.

As the creator of elastic search are declairing at the project’s first page:

So, we build a web site or an application and want to add search to it, and then it hits us: getting search working is hard. We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that is built for the cloud.

I use elastic search for the GreekAndroidApps project, I’m developing it with the play framework and it cames handy with a play module ready to use.

One feature I really love (among the others) is the fuzzy search.
This line does a fuzzy search on the “title” or the “description” fields.

BoolQueryBuilder qb1 = boolQuery().should(fuzzyQuery("title", searchString)).should(fuzzyQuery("description", searchString));

So, goodbye “select * from item where content like ‘%term%’” queries!!!