Appcelerator Titanium: Up and Running: Building Native iOS and Android Apps Using JavaScript

153 Pages·2013·10.8 MB·English

by  John Anderson

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Appcelerator Titanium:
Up and Running
John Anderson
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Appcelerator Titanium: Up and Running
by John Anderson
Copyright © 2013 John Anderson. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
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Editors: Andy Oram and Mike Hendrickson Cover Designer: Randy Comer
Production Editor: Kara Ebrahim Interior Designer: David Futato
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March 2013: First Edition
Revision History for the First Edition:
2013-03-08: First release
See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781449329556 for release details.
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ISBN: 978-1-449-32955-6
[LSI]
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Table of Contents
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
1. The Benefits of Titanium. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
When to Use Titanium 2
When Titanium Makes Sense 2
Cross-Platform Compatibility 3
Using Titanium for Just One Platform 5
When Titanium Doesn’t Make Sense 6
Mobile Landscape 8
PhoneGap 8
Sencha Touch 9
jQuery Mobile 9
jQTouch 10
MonoTouch 10
Where’s the GUI? 11
Death of Xcode and ADK? 11
Pricing and Support 12
2. Getting Set Up to Use Titanium. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Selecting a Development Environment 15
Setting Up Your Native SDKs 16
Other Hardware Prerequisites 18
External Displays 18
3. Titanium Studio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Features of Titanium Studio 21
Automatic Syntax Checking 22
Autocomplete (Intellisense) 22
Debugging 23
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Building Your App 24
Titanium Studio and Other Text Editors 25
4. A Hello World App. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Building Your First App 27
Writing the App 30
The Files in Your First Project 36
The tiapp.xml File 36
Build Folder 39
Events 41
Custom Events 42
5. Becoming a Capable Control Freak. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Basic UI Controls 48
Window-Based UI Controls 51
Picker Control 51
Option Control 52
Creating Your Own Composite Objects 54
The Customized Slider Object 54
Custom Attributes on Controls 60
More Uses for Custom Controls 63
The Main Event 64
Event Propagation 66
6. Titanium Objects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
App Object 69
Storing Data in the App Object 70
Pause and Resume Events 70
Background Services 71
Local Notifications 72
Window and View Objects 74
Window and View Layout 78
Layout 78
View Controllers 84
Navigation Group 85
TabGroup Object 89
Conclusion 91
7. Customizing Titanium. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
What’s in a Name...Space 93
Titanium Compatibility Layer (TiCL) 94
Version and Sharing Considerations 96
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Copying and Merging 96
Further Compatibility 98
Convenience Functions 102
Titanium Modules and Their Uses 104
How to Write a Module 104
Titanium Mobile Marketplace 105
Using a Titanium Module 106
Adding the Module 107
Referencing the Module 108
Calling a Module from Titanium Code 110
Appcelerator Cloud Services 111
8. Titanium App Storage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Local File Storage 113
Database Storage 114
ResultSets 116
9. Distribution Methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Apple’s App Store 119
Custom B2B Apps 120
Apple’s Enterprise Distribution 120
Android’s Marketplace 126
10. API Reference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Titanium 130
Titanium.API 130
Titanium.Accelerometer 132
Titanium.Analytics 132
Titanium.Android 132
Titanium.Android.currentActivity 133
Titanium.Android.Calendar 133
Titanium.Android.NotificationManager 133
Titanium.App 134
Titanium.App.Android 134
Titanium.App.iOS 134
Titanium.App.Properties 135
Titanium.Codec 135
Titanium.Contacts 135
Titanium.Database 135
Titanium.Facebook 136
Titanium.Filesystem 136
Titanium.Geolocation 136
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Titanium.Gesture 136
Titanium.Locale 136
Titanium.Map 137
Titanium.Media 138
Titanium.Network 138
Titanium.Network.Socket 138
Titanium.Platform 138
Titanium.Stream 138
Titanium.UI 139
Titanium.UI.Android 139
Titanium.UI.Clipboard 139
Titanium.UI.iOS 139
Titanium.UI.iPad 139
Titanium.UI.iPhone 139
Titanium.UI.MobileWeb 140
Titanium.Utils 140
Titanium.XML 140
Titanium.Yahoo 140
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Preface
Introduction
Titanium allows you to create mobile applications on multiple platforms from a single
codebase using native UI components. This allows you to create applications that per‐
form well, and look great across multiple operating systems.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.
Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements
such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables,
statements, and keywords.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values deter‐
mined by context.
This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.
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This icon indicates a warning or caution.
Using Code Examples
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if this book includes code
examples, you may use the code in your programs and documentation. You do not need
to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code.
For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does
not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly
books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting
example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of ex‐
ample code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title,
author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Appcelerator Titanium: Up and Running by
John Anderson (O’Reilly). Copyright 2013 John Anderson, 978-1-449-32955-6.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above,
feel free to contact us at [e-mail].
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