Hi :)

howdy, Bonnie!

How are you doing?

under the weather

otherwise, OK -- and you?

Oh, that's too bad

I'm ok

I'm going to upload a screenshot because I have a question.

you're wondering why the EditTexts get short

right?

I copied the XML layout file word for word.

Yeah

bug in Android

Oh, ok

I have an outstanding issue on it in b.android.com

Ok I just had to make sure

I don't remember seeing it in 2.2, so perhaps it is fixed now

Ok

Also, near the end of the layout file, I wonder if there is a typo.

I see this: android:layout_above="@id/details"

And there is no + after the @

Is that a typo or does it mean something different?

because @+id/details appears earlier in the file, IIRC

Usually it's @+id

you only need the + if it is the first time you use the ID

Ok

I see. Thanks :)

second and subsequent times, you can drop it

Ok

any other questions?

One more thing

I'm on page 41 of the Busy Coder's book

It describes a new and easier way of linking OnClick to a button

instead of using the anonymous inner class

android:onClick="..."

Yeah

I was wondering if you had a full code sample for the entire application for that.

I have two code fragments, but I'm a beginner.

not in that book

It helps if I get the whole thing.

however...

That is a short example from my Advanced Android book that uses this technique

Just kinda ignore everything else in the sample :-)

Ok, perfect

Ok :)

I looked at the main.xml file and can't find the android:onClick="..." part. Is it in another file?

hold on

whoops, sorry, wrong example

ok

Thanks, I see it now

Back to my first question. Everytime there is a bug in Android, how do you work around it, or are you just forced to avoid using that layout until a new version is released?

for bugs in general, I mean

that's impossible to answer in the abstract

Yeah, I guess it is pretty broad

in the case of having a TableLayout and ListView as siblings in the same parent, you'd just have to come up with a different UI

ok

for example, this problem goes away in a tutorial or two, when you split those into separate tabs

I see

howdy, Jere_Jones!

Howdy!

Hi :)

Friendly room today! :) Hi Bonnie!

what can I do for you this evening?

My original intent was to lurk but I'm glad to grill you if no one else is.

I'm done with asking my questions for now

small crowd on the day after a holiday, I suppose

hence, grill away

though if you break out a bottle of A-1 Steak Sauce, I'm outta here

:-)

Cool. What kind of thoughts do you have on testing? Particularly unit tests and activity simulations.

On Android, it drives me up a wall

My specific problem area is how to test without having to constantly reset the db.

uh, well, JUnit-style testing tends to want you to start from a clean slate on each test method

Extracting that dependency is what I would do in C#. In Java/Android, eh, I'm less organized I guess.

I think there are ways around that, though I'm fuzzy on the details

Personally, I'd try to test as much as possible outside of Anroid

er, Android

whatever business logic you can keep in a separate JAR and test however you want, the better

that doesn't tend to work out too often in practice, though

I have noticed that testing on the emulator is dog slow.

it helps if you choose the right test case class

depending on what you're testing

I'm using AndroidTestCase for behind the scenes stuff and AndroidInstrumentationTestCase2 for ui interaction testing

yup, that's about the right answer

if any "behind the scenes stuff" doesn't interact with Android much, you may be able to just use TestCase

It is the ui stuff that is just SLOW. 5-10 seconds per test.

yup

did I mention that testing on Android drives me up a wall?

I don't have any pure calculation testing to do. So I'm either dealing with the database or the ui. Ugh.

Robotium is really helpful for ui testing, but still slow.

Gotta test though. Irritating or not. I hate regression bugs.

haven't had a chance to play with Robotium yet

Oh! Concrete question!

but if they have Cucumber integration the way their home page says, I gotta give it a shot

I have an AVD that was specified to mimic my EVO. But sometimes it shows up as HDPI and sometimes as MDPI. I don't get why it would change? Any idea?

what do you mean by "shows up as HDPI"?

and concrete "is a construction material composed of cement (commonly Portland cement) and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate (generally a coarse aggregate made of gravels or crushed rocks such as limestone, or granite, plus a fine aggregate such as sand), water, and chemical admixtures"

It's like sometimes it thinks it is 480x800. Other times it thinks it is 320x480.

:-)

Concrete vs Abstract. :)

that behavior is really strange

that's in an AVD config file

it should not fluctuate

That's what I thought. I get the same behavior whether Eclipse kicks off the emulator or IntelliJ IDEA.

you might post that one to [android-developers] -- Xav Ducrohet is responding to a reasonable number of tools questions

Ok.

Question - where do you learn about testing as a beginner? I haven't gotten there yet. I'm self-teaching myself without a Comp Sci. degree.

Philosophy? Technique? Syntax?

lots of books, both language-specific and general

Technique to start, I suppose

Ok

for Android, a book on JUnit would be a likely starting point

Yeah, JUnit sounds familiar.

The other stuff you two discussed was Greek to me.

unfortunately, this is one of those things where Java's book peak was several years ago

JUnit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing and Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit are solid choices based on Amazon reviews

There are (that I know of) three primary techniques to testing. AAA, Record and Replay, and Behavior. I'm a big AAA (Arrange, Act, Assert) guy myself. Just makes more sense. And JUnit is set up just for that. Cucumber, which Mark mentioned earlier, is a Behavior type. I don't know of anything that is Record and Replay in Java.

but they were for 2004, so there will be some places where they are out of date with respect to where JUnit progressed

Ok

I'll make a note of that, thanks

you can find some record-and-replay tools for Swing, but it would take firmware mods to do it in Android

It is probably still good. JUnit has a fairly stable syntax.

I think AAA is the easiest to get started with. Would you think so Mark?

when I learned software testing, we were doing it with flint axes

hence, AAA and Behavior are a wee bit newer than I tend to think :-)

I started as a C++ programmer where unit tests are fancy dancy things that managed programmers do. :)

a well-done Behavior framework can simplify things greatly...but an incomplete one would be frustrating as all get out

AAA is probably the most straight-forward approach

and it's what Android is set up to do

if it weren't for that teensy performance issue

You would probably have the performance issue regardless of technique, wouldn't you?

it certainly won't be fast

but JUnit wants to flush everything and rebuild it all on each test method

that's what makes the UI testing so slow

so, take the Test Monkey -- it is fairly snappy, but it is effectively write-only

(other than exceptions the random input raises)

Bonnie, my favorite beginner testing book has been the Art of Unit Testing. The examples are in C# but the syntax is very close to Java and the ideas are language agnostic.

Ok

I still haven't tried Monkey.

it's really easy to run

and always good for a laugh

Just curious, do you both have degrees or are self-taught?

I have degrees, but not in computer science

I'm self taught.

Ok :)

Awesome

How long did it take until you felt confident?

confident in what?

I took one C++ course at a community college after doing a degree in something else and I'm learning the rest on my own.

In general, as a programmer.

:: shrug ::

on par with someone with a degree.

My favorite quote: "Computer Science is as much about programming as Astronomy is about telescopes"

I learned programming by writing BASIC code on pieces of paper, bringing it to my local Radio Shack, and entering it on a TRS-80 Model I they had on display

Haha :)

Don't feel inferior to those with degrees.

Ok

yeah, seriously

That's good to know

there are tons of self-taught developers

Very few of the best programmers I know have CS degrees. They are more likely to have liberal arts degrees.

particularly on newer technologies

Or no degrees.

Ok. I guess the job ads are misleading.

They always seem to require degrees, but the ads are probably written by non-programmers.

ah, well, hiring managers will ask for the sun, moon, and stars

then, it's a question of how urgent the need is

They will (sometimes) also say "or equivalent experience"

nowadays, I'd focus on building up a portfolio demonstrating your ability -- blog posts, open source apps, contributions to open source projects, etc.

In my experience it doesn't take much experience to be equivalent to a CS Bachelors unless the job is math/algorithm heavy.

True, I see that a lot too

Ah, no wonder. I look at game industry postings a lot.

whether you got that ability from a CS degree, a bunch of books, or a Vulcan mind-meld won't matter if they can see the ability

Haha ok :)

Right!

game industry used to be a bit more difficult to get into, but I haven't paid much attention in the past, oh, 15 years or so... :-)

I decided to become an indie game developer for Android

IMHO, the best way to improve as a programmer is to program. Read lots of code. Write lots of code.

Yeah

Mark's tutorial book is helping a lot. My other Android books have lots of prose but only a few lines of code here and there.

yeah, that's why I'm big on fully-runnable sample projects

and lots of small ones, outside of the Tutorials

It's a fantastic way to learn

Mark, relatively simple question: What is the difference between a Service and an IntentService other than the self included thread in an IntentService?

IntentService will automatically call stopSelf() if, after onHandleIntent() completes work on the background thread, there is no more work to be done (i.e., no startService() calls in the meantime)

so, IntentService is a great "fire and forget" way of doing something in the background and not worrying about it taking up memory for an extended period

other than that, it's a pretty thin class

Is there a way to look at the "queue" for IntentService?

it doesn't even know how to keep the phone awake, which is why I've been steadily refining my WakefulIntentService

Which I love!

there are no public methods to examine the queue

rephrase that -- there are no SDK methods to examine the queue

I'm thinking along the lines of a download queue.

At the end of downloading one thing, it would call startService for the next download. But I wouldn't want to do that if the download was already in the "queue"

the problem is that IntentService has a single thread, not a thread pool like AsyncTask

oh, you'd need to track that yourself

AsyncTask vs IntentService? Both are "fire and forget". When to use one or the other?

just override onStart() or onStartCommand(), keep tabs on the pending downloads, and chain to the superclass

I don't know that you can answer that question in the abstract

"chain to the superclass"? super.whatever()?

super.onStart() or super.onStartCommand(), whichever you overrode

that way, the normal IntentService logic continues

but, you got notified of the item being added to the queue, so you can track it

Well, lets see. AsyncTask gives you an easy way to get back on the ui thread. But you could do that in IntentService with runOnUiThread, right?

runOnUiThread() is a method on Activity

I'm thinking about asynctask vs intentservice

AsyncTask onPostExecute(), in theory, is on the main application thread

however, you have to create it on the main application thread, so you would use that in a regular Service, not in onHandleIntent() of an IntentService

Yeah, because there may not be an activity around while IntentService is running, right? Of course the same could be said about an asynctask.

Well, I've got 9pm here. I appreciate the time you share Mark! Your books are great and I'm looking very forward to the NDK book.

Thanks, Mark :)

And you too, Jere, for your input

gadzooks! the time flies when you're looking forward to getting doped up on NyQuil!

I hates colds

Hahaha

Get better. Coding with a cold sucks.

thanks!

have a pleasant evening, all!