Google

Android Emulator and NetBeans

Whenever you ask or search for help regarding Android development, you end up with some fix related to the Eclipse ADT plugin or the Android SDK tools. My intention is to fix that by repeating parts of a great tip I found at Tim Perry’s blog. It is about how to get hold of the resources placed under the /assets folder in you Android project while running your applictaion in the Emulator from NetBeans. If your application tries to access resources from the AssetManager you will get a FileNotFoundException. The reason for this is that the assets are not packaged with the .apk like it is if you package and deploy it using the SDK tools.

The solution is:

  1. Go into nbproject/project.properties and add ‘assets.available=true‘

Voila! You will now be able to run, debug and step through your code as you would expect.

Google App Engine

It is amazing what a month in South Africa does to you. Things like Twitter, Facebook and blogging becomes pretty distant… But now I have been home for a while, Sun+Oracle has been approved by EU, I have finished (almost) my kitchen renovation and celebrated yet another birthday, so it is time to get started again!

After a discussion with a colleague at a coffee break this morning, I decided to try out Google App Engine. The getting started guide is a great place to start. It gives you a great walk-through setting up the development environment and creating a sample application. Since I am no big fan of Eclipse, I installed the Google App Engine Plugin for NetBeans. After resolving a small issue regarding path settings (see solution here), it was up and running perfectly.

Next steps will be to figure out what changes that has to be made to my existing applications to be able to deploy them on app engine. Probably the server side of YouOweMe will be the first candidate. Or maybe the KanbanFX server. I haven’t decided yet…