Jason Lee 2011-09-13

Today, I presented basic Android development at the Oklahoma City JUG. In the presentation, we walked through a very simple (and very ugly) note-taking application. The app allows the user to list, view, add, edit, and delete notes. There are no bells and whistles in the app, as I was trying to find something that is non-trivial enough to be interesting, yet no so complex that the audience gets lost in all the details. Overall, I think I succeeded there, though I guess the evaluation slips should tell me how far off I really was. :)

As I said at the start of the talk, it's not a pretty app, and I likely violate many of the best practices the Google and other experts suggest, but it's a functional app and, for that reason alone, I think, a decent start. I've pushed the sources to GitHub so anyone can take a look at it, fork it, etc. As time permits, I hope to clean the code up some, and add, via comments, some of the discussion we had in the talk itself. That will likely make the code a bit more valuable and interesting.

Thanks to all who attended, especially those who shouted out hints for things I broke. :P

Jason Lee 2011-04-19

Over the weekend, I published my first Android application, Cub Tracker . Cub Tracker is really a pretty simple application, but one born out of a personal need. My oldest son is a Cub Scout Wolf, and I am his den leader. There have been countless times where we had been out somewhere, and my wife and I would ask each other, "I wonder if there's a Cub Scout achievement or elective for this?" At the time, there was no easy to find out. There are web sites that list these, of course, but it wasn't convenient to load the page and search it while we're in the middle of something.

Given what I do for a living, I immediately thought, "There should be an app for that!" and Cub Tracker was born. I won't go into all the details here (there's a site for that, though it's pretty bare at the moment), but Cub Tracker allows you to track the achievements and electives of one or more Cub Scouts on your mobile device. It will also generate a report that can be emailed to, say, your Scout's den leader.

It's not flashy and probably isn't very exciting for many people, but I'm pretty proud of it and expect I'll get a lot of use out of it. If you have a Scout, please check it out and let me know what you think.

Jason Lee 2011-03-10

I was asked this morning about creating JDBC resources via REST. As with user management , it's actually pretty simple, once you've seen how. Let's take a look.

Jason Lee 2011-03-09

A user on the GlassFish forums recently asked how to create users in bulk. The asadmin command create-file-user doesn't support passing the password as a parameter, which makes scripting difficult. The REST interface, though, can help there, and it's really pretty simple.

Jason Lee 2011-03-04

If you've been following my series on using the GlassFish REST interface, you've probably noticed that your JSON and XML output isn't pretty-printed like mine. While there are several online tools that can fix that for you, there's no need for the extra step. GlassFish will do that for you. Let's look at how to make that happen.