Starter Step

We recently released our popular mobile travel application TripCase on Android, and though we liked developing with the Android framework more than iphone, blackberry, and winmo, we ran into some cumbersome concepts like the Android Activity.  TripCase has many forms, work-flows, viewable and editable data, interactions with the device, and makes many calls to our Rails back-end server.  So in order to streamline our development efforts on Android we created a small micro-framework that we are now calling DynaDroid and would like to open it up to the Android community for use.

Here are some of the features you get with DynaDroid:

• Code by convention and all your xml layouts and menus are dynamically available.
• Screen management for pushing, popping, and swapping screens (all with transition animations).
• Screen orientation (landscape, portrait) can be controlled on a screen by screen basis.
• Error reporting support built-in, so if your app crashes a report is sent to you.
• Entire framework is housed within a singe Activity, so sharing data between screens is finally easy again.

And here is what is coming:

• More dynamic coding conventions – let’s get rid of all those if/else and case statements!
• Built-in screen analytics for tracking user interaction
• Simplified device to server communication with xml/json parsing and automatic error handling
• Extensions to Android UI components without all the plumbing
• Easier to use api for interacting with device capabilities (camera, gps, phone, etc..)

And it’s very easy to get started…just checkout the DynaDroid source from the subversion repository found here.  The source is setup as an example Android application so all you have to do is import it into Eclipse or IntelliJ and just run it.

We would really like your feedback on the framework and if you have any questions or issues please visit the DynaDroid Google Group.

Enjoy!