ICEsoft.org Forums: ICEfaces, ICEmobile, ICEpdf

ICEmobile-Faces EE is now available for subscription. See the product announcement here:

http://jforum.icesoft.org/JForum/posts/list/0/20742.page#73139

ICEsoft is pleased to announce the availability of ICEmobile-Faces EE 1.0.0.GA.

This commercial version of ICEmobile-Faces 1.0 provides additional features and benefits targeted at robust and scalable enterprise application deployments. ICEmobile-Faces EE is a fully-tested and certified enterprise-grade solution ideal for companies that require a fully-supported production platform with guaranteed SLA response times.

What's New in EE 1.0?

Support for additional platforms such as WebSphere 8, WebLogic 12c, and JBoss 7.1

Additional mobile components including MenuButton, PanelConfirmation, SubmitNotification, and PanelPopup

Adaptive Heartbeating for mobile deployments

Platform-specific Cloud Push connectors for Android, Apple and Blackberry

IDE Integrations for Eclipse, NetBeans, MyEclipse, and RAD/RSA 8.

For more information on ICEmobile-Faces EE 1.0, see the following resources:

Licensed Subscribers

Release Notes

Download

General

ICEmobile-Faces EE Overview

ICEmobile-Faces EE Subscriptions

ICEmobile-Faces 1.0 GA has been achieved. See the Product Announcment.

ICEmobile-Faces 1.0 Final is now available for download. See the Product Announcement.

ICEsoft is pleased to announce the official release of ICEmobile-Faces 1.0

Now you can build ICEfaces/JSF applications that deliver a true mobile user experience to today's most advanced smart phones. Features include:

Native look and feel

HTML5/CSS3 support

Mobile push with cloud-based notification

Native device integration for access to capabilities like camera, camcorder and microphone

"Write-once" cross-platform support for Android, iOS, and Blackberry

Leverages standard Java EE infrastructure, development tools, and skill sets

What's Included?

The ICEmobile Component Suite includes all the UI controls you need to build mobile applications. The components automatically adjust to the client device they are running on to provide a native look and feel, tailoring their capabilities to match the device capabilities. See the components in action in the Mobile Showcase.

Default CSS themes are provided for Android (phones and tablets), iOS (iPhone and iPad), and Blackberry phones.

Device Containers provide native integration to capabilities like camera, camcorder, and microphone.

Ajax Push has been optimized for mobile deployments, and includes new Cloud Push capabilities to all major device types (Android, iOS, Blackberry).

Tools bundles are provided for Eclipse and NetBeans.

Demo applications, code samples, tutorials, and complete documentation are provided to get you up and developing quickly.

Download

ICEmobile-Faces 1.0 is available for download in the following formats:

Binary and source-code bundles.

Maven2 Public Repository (jars only).

SVN repository checkout.

IDE integration bundles are also available for:

Eclipse 3.6, 3.7

NetBeans 7.0, 7.1

More Information

Release Notes

ICEmobile Overview

ICEmobile Documentation

ICEmobile Demos

We are almost there! The ICEmobile 1.0 Release Candidate is now available, and is feature complete for final release. We expect to release ICEmobile 1.0 Final within the week.

ICEmobile is based on the hot-off-the-presses ICEfaces 3.0 framework, and inherits all its features and benefits. Now you can unleash the power of ICEfaces and JSF on your mobile applications. ICEmobile offers seamless cross-platform development for Android, iOS and Blackberry. Check it out for yourself.

Overview: http://www.icesoft.org/products/ICEmobile-EE/overview.jsf
Download: http://www.icesoft.org/downloads/icemobile-downloads.jsf
Wiki: http://wiki.icefaces.org/display/icemobile/ICEmobile-Faces
Release Notes: http://wiki.icefaces.org/display/icemobile/ICEmobile+1.0+RC1

While you are at it, check out our new consolidated web site. Everything you need to know about all our open source projects, and products is now accessible from one spot.

http://www.icesoft.org

To make cloud push work in your own deployment, you need to configure the web application with the cloud connectors that are to be supported. In the Open Source bundle, the only connector that is supported is email. If you want the platform-specific connectors they are available only under an Enterprise license.

We have a tutorial (still under construction) that explains how to get cloud push working with the email connector. That might help you get started.

http://wiki.icefaces.org/display/icemobile/Cloud+Push

To capture the log you need to use a tool from the sdk called ddms. It lives in <sdk_dir>/tools.

To capture a log you must enable usb debugging on the device, and connected to your computer with the usb cable.

You enable USB Debugging from Settings>Applications>Development. Once you are connected, you should see the device in the ddms console, where you can select it and view the logs. You can probably filter on error level logging, but have a look at the complete log and see what you can see. There is a button in ddms that will let you save the log to disk.

Also, try some of the other components. The carousel uses some touchscreen javascript, which could be the issue.

Thanks for your help.

I just retested the Market download on my devices and don't see any issues. Can you provide details about your device? Also, can you capture the device log with ddms?

The audio problem has been corrected for the Samsung tablet. For some unknown reason, when AAC encoding is used to capture audio on the tablet, the application hangs in the MediaRecorder.stop() function without an exception. We now detect the tablet and configure the MediaRecorder to use the default audio encoding, which works fine. The patched container is now available on the Android Market.

Regarding your other questions:

5) Will the container be able to listen to mobile events? (i.e. because of security reasons we have to make the user re-login into the application any times the mobil comes back from the 'power save state'.)

From the container we can hook into any available platform specific events. We already handle the concept of the container pausing and resuming for our cloud push features, so something could be done along those lines. A cookie containing the timestamp for when the app was resumed would allow the server to compare the different timestamps to determine if the request it is now receiving is from a different "view session".

6) Will the connection be able to support the management of an USB connection? (i.e. in the near future we have to support the management of an external device through USB)

This would require the implementation of drivers within the container to control USB devices. These may need to be device-specific, but it might be possible to define some generic Javascript APIs for certain classes of devices.

7) Can we manage the local storage of files on the device for a later bulk
upload to the server (i.e. sometimes it happens that our customers are in places with an unstable connection and they prefer to store all files first (videos, sound files, photos, texts, etc) and then send all of them later in one single opperation.

Seems like the cleanest way to implement this might be through album-level integration. You can shoot photos and video using the native phone capabilities, and then select what you want using container integration. There is already a varient of this implemented in the android container where you can set a preference to "Use Media Gallery". When set, the camera and camcorder components will select from the gallery instead of activating the camera. It is useful for developing on a simulator, where no camera is available. The main addition to the approach would be to support multiple selections for uploading.

So yes all of these features seem doable. That is not to say that they are currently on our roadmap though. Community input will drive that roadmap, so if you have a specific project, with well-defined requirements we would be interested in understanding those requirements more completely, and determine how and when they might fit into our development plans.

1) Did I get this problem because I am missing something?

Did you experience these problems on both devices, or just the tablet? We have not done any tablet testing with Android, but will be.

2) Did I experienced these problems because I worked on a non fully supported Android version?

Probably. What versions are on your devices?

3) what Android versions are you supporting now?

We have been testing against 2.2 and 2.3

4) when are we going to get (schedule) the first final release?

1.0 final is scheduled for end of Nov. We have to piggyback on the ICEfaces 2.1 Final, as we rely on the same core ICEfaces framework.

If you can provide the details about your devices and any error logs from ddms, that would be useful in helping us debug the problems you have encountered.

1. I do not see ICEmobile demo container app available on the Android market. Perhaps this is because I have an older Android phone (Samsung Moment) running 2.1?

The container is available on Android Market. See:

https://market.android.com/details?id=org.icemobile.client.android&feature=search_result

It currently specifies 2.2, so that is probably why you are not seeing it. We could probably back the requirements off to 2.1, although Cloud Push with C2DM requires 2.2. You can also download the .apk directly from our download site. See:

http://www.icemobile.org/downloads.html

2. Do you know if an iPhone container (branded to my app) will pass muster with the Apple folks and be available on the app store? Has anyone developed an iPhone container - and eventually have it approved by Apple?

We are in process with Apple to get the iOS container approved on the App Store. It is proving to be an onerous process. If we succeed there, then there should be no problem getting your app through. As a second approach we will push a completed application based on the container through the app store process to validate that apps based on the container will pass. Finally, we will provide support to customers that want to put up an enterprise app store, so applications can be distributed internally at an organization.

3. Any plans to have a UPC scanner/barcode scanner component in addition to the QR scanner? How difficult would it be for a developer to create such a custom component?

No immediate plans, but community demand will drive our roadmap in the short term. Component development follows the JSF 2 standards, so it would be straight forward to adapt the component to UPC scanning. It would, however, require device container integration. We use an open source project for QR code scanning, so we would need to find or develop something similar for UPC codes.

4. Any plans for accelerometer or compass support? I guess my question revolves around the road map. There's not much info in JIRA, so I'm wondering what ICEsoft envisions for this product in the future.

Yes we have plans to integrate additional container features like accelerometer and compass. Most likely targeted for 1.1 release.

4. I see Windows Phone OS is not supported. Is that planned? Just wondering (I have no preferences for this - I'm just wondering).

No immediate plans to support Windows Phone OS. It will take some community demand to push us down that path.

In general we need to do some more extensive roadmap planning and share that with the community for feedback. We have been pretty much heads down getting the 1.0 feature set out.

We have used Amazon for on-line testing. You get a virtual node and can install Tomcat or any App server that you want. It's not free, but it is pretty cheap.

Steve

We have a good deal of experience doing custom integrations of this nature. If you are interested in pursuing these capabilities under a Services agreement, just contact our sales people. You can read more about our service offerings here:

http://www.icefaces.org/main/services/

Steve

AHS was replaced in 1.8 with the Push Server because it vastly reduces configuration required in a single node deployment. Enterprise Push Server is scheduled for release before end of May/09. It handles failover for Push in clustered environments.

Enterprise Push Server is available to all supported customers. Clustered deployment support is available to Professional and Enterprise level supported customers. See http://www.icefaces.org/main/support/support-options.iface for more details. Clustered deployment support is not provided in the public forums.