The Polyglot Developer

Parse An XML Response With PHP

September 1, 2014

If you’re like me, you find XML a real pain to deal with, but yet it still seems to exist with various web services. If you’re using Android or AngularJS, these frameworks can’t process XML out of the box, but they can JSON.

With the assistance of a PHP powered web server, you can easily transform the nasty XML responses you get into something more usable like JSON.

August 31, 2014

Nic Raboy

As a modern developer, at some point in time you’re going to find yourself needing to work with a RESTful API. You’re going to need to make HTTP requests to get data into your app or even change data on a remote database.

Lucky for us, making HTTP requests with Ionic Framework is a heck of a lot easier than making them with native code.

The following will show you how to make GET requests for JSON data at some fictional API endpoint. It is for Ionic Framework 1. If you’re looking for how to make HTTP requests using Ionic 2, check here.

August 27, 2014

Nic Raboy

Creating clean looking user interfaces in Android can often be challenging. With all the screen resolutions and screen densities that exist for Android, a lot more must be taken into consideration than iOS apps.

A nifty trick I figured out is being able to use font glyphs instead of PNG or JPEG images. When using standard images you must create an image for every density (xxhdpi, xhdpi, hdpi, mdpi) and even then it still might not look clear. When using font glyphs, the images will always look crisp because they are vector graphics.

For this example, I’m going to use Font Awesome because it is open source and there are more than 400 glyphs included.

August 25, 2014

Nic Raboy

It is always nice to have splash screens in your application. It is a great way to get your branding out, and show that your application is currently loading. No one likes to see a blank white screen for five seconds during launch.

Lucky for us, it is incredibly simple to add a splash screen to our Ionic project. Using Apache Cordova’s Splashscreen plugin, we can add a splash to our application with just two lines in our config.xml file.

August 22, 2014

Nic Raboy

The future of mobile app design is in the freemium model. No one wants to risk paying for an application that might stink so as a developer it is a good idea to charge for features in your app rather than the app itself.

Using Apache Cordova, Ionic Framework, and the poiuytrez AndroidInAppBilling plugin you can easily handle Android in-app purchases.

August 16, 2014

Nic Raboy

Anyone who has worked with a RESTful API using JavaScript knows that testing can be a complete pain if the API owner hasn’t enabled CORS on their server. So what is CORS? According to Wikipedia, it is the following:

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that allows many resources (e.g., fonts, JavaScript, etc.) on a web page to be requested from another domain outside the domain the resource originated from.

Often API owners will leave CORS disabled even though their API is open to the public. In my opinion it doesn’t feel public if the API owner is not allowing requests from all angles.

Here are a few tricks I’ve picked up in regards to bypassing the awful CORS errors you receive in your browser when testing.

August 10, 2014

Nic Raboy

There are roughly seven billion people in the world (7,000,000,000) and roughly 6,500 languages. Lucky for us, Android and iOS does not support all 6,500 of these languages. However, many are supported and this means that when you make an application in your native language, chances are your audience is only going to be a fraction of these people.

Recently I discovered Angular Tranlate, a JavaScript library for AngularJS. It allows you to create translation tables in your web application to quickly switch between depending on the language you desire. When you pair this with Ionic Framework, which supports AngularJS, you have a great way of adding internationalization and localization into your mobile application.

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