Table Of ContentAppcelerator Titanium
Business Application
Development
Cookbook
Over 40 hands-on recipes to quickly and efficiently
create business grade Titanium Enterprise apps
Benjamin Bahrenburg
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Appcelerator Titanium Business Application
Development Cookbook
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
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First published: June 2013
Production Reference: 1180613
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84969-534-3
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Cover Image by Will Kewley ([email protected])
Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Benjamin Bahrenburg Hardik Patel
Reviewers Proofreader
David Bankier Katherine Tarr
Imraan Jhetam
Indexer
Acquisition Editor Hemangini Bari
Joanne Fitzpatrick
Graphics
Lead Technical Editor Abhinash Sahu
Ritika Dewani
Production Coordinators
Technical Editors Melwyn Dsa
Prasad Dalvi Zahid Shaikh
Pushpak Poddar
Cover Work
Melwyn Dsa
Zahid Shaikh
About the Author
Benjamin Bahrenburg is a developer, blogger, speaker, and consultant. Ben specializes
in building enterprise solutions using mobile technologies, geolocation services, and
domain-specific languages. Over the last decade, he has provided mobility solutions for
numerous Fortune 100 organizations.
Ben is passionate about cross-platform development, particularly the use of Titanium mobile
for mobile app development. He was an early adopter of the Titanium mobile SDK and has
built apps since the earliest previews of Appcelerator's mobile platform. Ben is an active
member of the mobile development community and holds a Titanium certification in addition
to being part of the Appcelerator Titan evangelist group. A strong advocate and contributor to
the Titanium module ecosystem, Ben has published numerous open source modules used in
thousands of published apps.
An active blogger at bencoding.com, he frequently posts tutorials on mobile development
and enterprise coding topics.
I would like to thank my family, friends, and co-workers for their enthusiasm
and encouragement. Without their support, this book would not have been
possible. I would also like to thank the Titanium community for providing a
thriving environment to learn, create, and develop within.
About the Reviewers
David Bankier leads YY Digital, a company that builds integrated mobile, tablet, and
server-side applications for enterprise. Previously, David worked in the telecommunications
industry with a strong focus on VoIP technologies. He has used Titanium for mobile development
since 2010 and uses a mix of Node, Scala, and Java on the backend. David is also the creator of
TiShadow, the popular open source project for rapid Titanium development. As a Titan, David's
blog http://www.yydigital.com/blog dives deep into Titanium.
Imraan Jhetam is a medical doctor and entrepreneur living in England with equal loves for
both medical law and technology. He earned his Medical Degree from the University of Natal
in 1983, his MBA from the University of Witwatersrand and a Masters of Law Degree from
Cardiff University.
Imraan has been fascinated by computers since his youth and taught himself the basics of
programming during his university years. He has been writing programs since the mid 1970's
in various languages and for different platforms and has fond memories of his first Apple IIe
with its then impressive 64 KB RAM.
When he is not busy seeing patients or writing medico-legal reports, he spends his time
developing applications and developed Snappa, a social-sharing game that is the better way
to draw something for friends. This was written using the incredible Titanium Studio tools and
Appcelerator Cloud Services and is now in the Apple and Android App Stores. He was also
third prize winner at the first Codestrong Hackathon with two e-payment apps PayBill and
PayPad, that also included social media, geolocation, photos, and bar-codes, and which
were developed in a restricted and short time using Appcelerator Titanium Studio.
You can contact Imraan via www.snappa.mobi or via Twitter @The__i.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Patterns and Platform Tools 7
Introduction 7
Defining an app namespace 10
CommonJS in practice 10
Using platform indicators 19
Global logging using Ti.App.Listener 27
Chapter 2: Cross-platform UI 33
Introduction 33
Cross-platform HUD progress indicator 34
In-app notifications 38
Screen Break Menu 44
Metro Style Tab Control 49
Slideout Menu 53
Chapter 3: Using Databases and Managing Files 63
Introduction 63
Accessing your database's Ti.Filesystem 64
DbTableChecker SQLite table existence checking 69
Recursively handling files using Dossier 74
Tuning your SQLite database for maximum performance 77
Data access using DbLazyProvider 83
NoSQL using MongloDb 87
Chapter 4: Interacting with Web Services 93
Introduction 93
Consuming RSS feeds 94
Creating a business location map using Yahoo Local 101
Using Google Analytics in your app 106
Table of Contents
Making SOAP service calls using SUDS.js 111
Using the LinkedIn Contacts API 117
Chapter 5: Charting and Documents 127
Introduction 127
Opening PDF documents 128
Using an iPad for document signatures 134
Creating PDF documents from images or screenshots 140
Generating PDF documents using jsPDF 144
Creating a scheduling chart using RGraph 148
Displaying information with Google gauges 154
Chapter 6: Using Location Services 159
Introduction 159
Native geolocation using basicGeo 160
Using the Ti.GeoProviders framework for geolocation 168
Multitenant geolocation 176
Calculating distance between addresses 181
Background geolocation management 188
Chapter 7: Threads, Queues, and Message Passing 197
Introduction 197
Queuing multiple downloads 198
Launching one app from another 206
Cross-platform URL schemes 214
Opening your Android app with BOOT_COMPLETED 224
iOS Multithreading using Web Workers 233
Chapter 8: Basic Security Approaches 239
Introduction 239
Implementing iOS data protection in Titanium 240
AES encryption using JavaScript 246
Basic authentication using Ti.Network.HTTPClient 252
Implementing a cross-platform passcode screen 257
Working with protected ZIP files on iOS 262
Chapter 9: App Security Using Encryption and Other Techniques 269
Introduction 269
Using secure properties 270
Object and string encryption 277
Working with encrypted files 281
Handling protected PDFs on iOS 286
Android lock screen monitor 292
ii
Table of Contents
Appendix: Titanium Resources 297
Getting started with Titanium 297
Getting started with Android 298
Getting started with iOS 298
Titanium testing resources 298
Modules and open source 299
Titanium community links 300
Index 303
iii
