Writing an Android application in JavaScript and HTML5


Happy Mother's Day everyone! This year I wrote an Android app for my wife for Mother's Day. How geeky is that?

The reason I wrote it is that my wife's favorite Android application, Word Mix Lite, recently added annoying banner ads. While the sensible thing to do might have been to switch to another app, or perhaps upgrade to the paid version of Word Mix, I thought it might be interesting to see if I could write my own replacement.

And as long as I was writing the app, I though I'd try writing it using JavaScript. Normally Android applications are written in Java, but it's also possible to write them in JavaScript, by using a shell application such as PhoneGap.

Why use JavaScript instead of Java? Well, hack value mostly. On the plus side it's a fun to write! Another potential plus is that it is theoretically possible to run the same PhoneGap application on both Android and Apple.

The drawback is that PhoneGap is not very popular yet, especially among Android developers, and so there is relatively little documentation. I ran into problems related to touch events and click events that I still haven't completely solved.

It took about three days to write the application. The first day was spent:
  • Finding a public domain word list.
  • Filtering the word list to just 3-to-6 character words.
  • Build a "trie" to make it fast to look up anagrams.
  • Output the trie as a JSON data structure.
The second day was spent writing the core of the word jumble game.
  • This was all done on a desktop, using Chrome's built-in Javascript IDE.
The third day was spent:
  • Porting to PhoneGap.
  • Debugging Android-specific issues.
  • Tuning the gameplay for the phone.
The project went pretty well.
  • JavaScript is a very easy language to work in.
  • CSS styling was fairly easy to learn.
  • Targeting a single browser made it relatively easy to use the DOM.
  • The Chrome JavaScript debugger was very helpful.
  • The web has a wealth of information on JavaScript and HTML / CSS programming information.

In the end there were unfortunately a few button-event UI glitches I couldn't solve in time for Mother's Day. When I get some spare time I'd like to revisit this project and see if I could use the JQTouch library to solve my UI glitches. I'd also like to make an open source release of a reskinned (non-Mother's Day themed) version of this app. And then who knows? Maybe I'll release it for the other phones that PhoneGap supports as well. :-)






Comments

Unknown said…
Cool!
Meybe a stupid question but is it possible to run a HTML + JS app in the phones own browser?
December 7, 2010 at 3:35 AM
David said…
Cool! Where's the app, can I try it?
February 22, 2011 at 10:06 AM
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