Presenter: Aaron Bartell

Topic: RPG Droid - Developing your first Android application

I recently switched from a Blackberry to a Motorola Google Android (aka Droid) for my mobile device. While sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight I decided I would see how much work was involved in creating a simple Android application from scratch. Turns out it only took about 45 minutes and that included downloading the entire Android development environment!

That got me excited because I realized I could not only develop something that ran on the Droid platform but also that it could easily communicate with RPG on IBM i using the OpenRPGUI free and open source framework.

This session will guide you through setting up the Droid development environment on your PC. Then we will develop a “hello world” Droid application and run it in the provided emulator – this means you don't need to own a Droid phone to test this out! Lastly we will walk through a full working example showing how to have the Droid phone talk to OpenRPGUI via HTTP.

Why would you want to learn how to write Droid applications? Because the Google Android platform is fast becoming one of the most popular in existence. More and more people are using their mobile devices for things normally done from a laptop or desktop. This means your customers or other internal employees (i.e. C-level executives) will soon start expecting you to offer them the capability to communicate with your data through mobile devices.