Using Gradle In Your Command Line Android Project

April 24, 2015 Nic Raboy

I’ve been developing mobile Android applications since 2011 and up until now I’ve been using nothing but Apache Ant for building them.

Now you’re probably like, it is 2015, why aren’t you using Gradle like the rest of the world? Well, I like Apache Ant, and I had no real reason to switch. However, I’ve decided this is the year I jump ship.

If you’re like me, a no IDE rebel coming from an Apache Ant world for Android development, this might help you out in making the switch to Gradle.

Adding Background Images To Ionic Framework Apps

April 21, 2015 Nic Raboy

I started working on an app and decided it was time to step up my design game. Usually my apps suffer from looking plain or dated even though they have some insanely awesome functionality (ex: OTP Safe). However, after looking at many other apps, I came to the conclusion that an app can look more attractive just by including a logo or some other kind of branding images.

The tricky part here is, how might you add images to your Ionic Framework application and have them look good across devices with multiple screen densities? After doing some research I found that this could easily be accomplished by using background images created with CSS.

Use Parse Core In Your Ionic Framework Mobile Apps

April 17, 2015 Nic Raboy

It is time I talk about another cloud data storage option for Ionic Framework. Previously I had shown how to use the Dropbox Datastore API, Firebase, and PouchDB to store information remotely.

This time I am going to discuss how to store data using Parse, a Facebook company, and retrieve data from the cloud.

Various Graph Search Algorithms Using Java

April 14, 2015 Nic Raboy

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, I’ve made a topic regarding Binary Search Trees, but another very important topic in computer science and software engineering is in regards to Graphs.

Graphs via Wikipedia:

A graph data structure consists of a finite (and possibly mutable) set of nodes or vertices, together with a set of ordered pairs of these nodes (or, in some cases, a set of unordered pairs). These pairs are known as edges or arcs.

When interviewing for a new programming or software engineering position, it is incredibly likely that you are asked a question on this topic. Because of this, I figured it would be a good idea to go over a few of the Graph search algorithms.

Determine If A Number Is Prime Using JavaScript

April 11, 2015 Nic Raboy

Continuing on the topic of interview questions for programming and software engineering type positions, I thought I’d brush up on a popular one.

Although I have never personally been asked about this, other people have told me that they’ve been asked to determine if a number is prime or to print out all prime numbers up to a certain number.

Create A Complex Calculator App Using Ionic Framework

April 8, 2015 Nic Raboy

If you’ve been keeping up, I previously wrote two tutorials on the topic of evaluating mathematical expressions. The first tutorial was on the topic of converting an Infix expression into a Postfix expression also known as Reverse Polish Notation using the Shunting Yard algorithm. The second tutorial was on the topic of solving the Postfix expression.

Using the hybrid application framework, Ionic Framework, we’re going to create a calculator application for solving these complex expressions. Think of it as a mobile front end for the nice algorithms we made.

Parse An XML Response With Java And Dom4J

April 5, 2015 Nic Raboy

Previously we’ve explored how to parse XML data using Node.js as well as PHP. Continuing on the trend of parsing data using various programming languages, this time we’re going to take a look at parsing XML data using the dom4j library with Java.

Now dom4j, is not the only way to parse XML data in Java. There are many other ways including using the SAX parser. Everyone will have their own opinions on which of the many to use.