Iphone Development

Mobilize Your MongoDB: Building MongoDB Mobile Apps with OpenShift PaaS Part II

Summary: This is the second part of a blog series that details how to develop a mobile application that is backed by MongoDB and a PaaS. MongoDB makes a great companion to this mobile application given its ability to shard and the nature of being able to store JSON documents with little data manipulation required. In this blog post, part two of the series, we will go over the required components and software in order to develop cross platform mobile applications for the iPhone and Android operating systems. We will also install and configure the backend systems, including mongodb , which makes a perfect data store for the BeerShift mobile application. We will be using the following applications and software stack components: Titanium Studio by Appcelerator Titanium Studio is an all-inclusive powerful Eclipse-based IDE that simplifies the mobile development process. Use Titanium Studio to rapidly build, test, package and publish mobile, desktop and web applications. Take advantage of new functionality like advanced code assisting, ACS integration, module management, Git integration, an enhanced publishing workflow and a full-featured editor. Manage Titanium projects, test your mobile apps in the simulator or on device, automate app packaging deploy to a public or private App Store and much more. * Xcode by Apple Even though we will be using Titanium Studio for our development, we will still need to have Xcode installed and configured so that we have access to several important tools. Not only will we be using the simulator to test out our iPhone application, we will also need the Xcode IDE in order to bundle and submit our application to the Apple App Store. Android SDK Since we are targeting both iOS and Android based devices, we will also need to install and configure the Android SDK for emulating the Android hardware for testing. OpenShift Client Tools OpenShift is Red Hat’s free, auto-scaling Platform as a Service (PaaS) for applications. As an application platform in the cloud, OpenShift manages the stack so you can focus on your code. We will be using this for our backend services and our cloud hosted MongoDB . While not required for this blog post series, I would suggest that a user also install a quality image editing application for sizing of icons and splash screens for your application. I prefer to use an open source software application called Gimp that will provide the user with most of the image editing capabilities they need. Step 1: Installing Xcode Note: If you are planning on targeting iOS platforms, you will typically need an iOS developer account . This will allow you to publish your application to the Apple App Store and receive product updates and announcements about new iOS platforms. This program typically costs 99.00USD per year. There are generally two ways to install Xcode on Mac OS. You can either install via the app store or you can download it directly from the Apple Developer Center. During this blog post, I will assume that you have access to the Apple App Store and will be detailing that route in order to install the IDE. Once you start the App Store application, search for Xcode and you should be directed to the following page: Once on this page, click the free button under the short description in order to install the IDE on your local operating system. Once the installation starts, be patient! Xcode is 1.5 gigs and can take up to a significant amount of time to install even on the fastest of connections. To check the status of the installation, you can go back to the App Store application and click on the Purchases tab at the top of the screen. This will display your current download position and how much time is remaining. Step 2: Installing OpenShift Client Tools Note: If you would rather watch a screencast of this step, check out this video where I demo how to install the client tools on OSX. The OpenShift client tools are written in a very popular programming language called Ruby . With OSX 10.6 and later, ruby is installed by default so installing the client tools is a snap. Simply issue the following command on your terminal application: $ sudo gem install rhc If you don't already have an OpenShift account, head on over to http://openshift.redhat.com and signup. It is completely free and Red Hat gives every user three free applications running in the cloud. At the time of this writing, the combined resources allocated for each user is 1.5gb of memory and 3gb of disk space. Now that we have the client tools installed, we also need to install the GIT source code repository tools. In order to do this, download the package from the GIT website by clicking on the Download for Mac button on the right hand side of the screen. Once the download of is .dmg file is complete, mount the image by clicking on it and open up Finder. Once Finder is open, click on the .pkg file to install GIT to your local system. Follow the installation instructions and close the dialog box once the installation has finished. Open up a new terminal window to ensure that your environment variables, including your path, have been updated to reflect the new git installation. At this point, we can create the backend server for our BeerShift application including the mongo database. For this blog post, we will be using a PHP backend but I have also written a backend for Ruby, Python and Java. $ rhc app create -a beershift -t php-5.3 The above command will provision some space for us on the Red Hat Cloud. It will also create a templated website for us to verify that the application creation was successful. Once the command has finished, verify that the application and server space was created by pointing your browser to the URL provided by the RHC tools. Now that we have an application created, lets create a mongodb data store to house our application data. This can be done by performing the following command. $ rhc-ctl-app -a beershift -e add-mongodb-2.0 This will return the database hostname, port, root user and root password for you to access the database. Don't worry, we will go into more detail on how all of this works with the blog post that covers the backend system for this application. Step 3: Install the Android SDK Appcelerator provides excellent instructions on how to install and configure the Android SDK for use with Titanium Studio. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I suggest that you follow the instructions already provided for this step. Step 4: Install Titanium Studio In order to install and use Titanium Studio, you will need to register for a developer account with Appcelerator. Head on over and click the Download Titanium button on the right hand side of the screen. This will redirect you to a sign up screen. Fill in the required details and submit the form and check your inbox for a validation email. Once you have validated your email, you will be redirected back to the Appcelerator site where you can download Titanium Studio. Once the .dmg file has downloaded, mount the image and follow the instruction to drag Titanium Studio to your Applications folder. Note: When you start the application for the first time, you may be prompted to install a Java runtime. If so, following the instructions that are presented and OSX will automatically find and install the Java runtime for you. Once Titanium Studio starts, you will be prompted for a location to store your workspace. The workspace is a location on your local machine where all of your source files and project settings will be stored. After you select your workspace location, you will be asked for your username and password. This is the username and password that you used to signup for an Appcelerator account. Once you are logged in, that IDE may perform an update to ensure that you are running the latest available code. Now that you have the IDE setup and your SDKs setup, get familiar with the IDE and play around with a few of the sample projects. In the next blog post we will begin development of the backend application and create our REST API that handle communication between the mobile application and the cloud hosted server. * http://www.appcelerator.com/platform/titanium-studio Tagged with: openshift, sdk, iphone, iphone development, objective c, red hat, open source, MongoDB, Mongo, NoSQL, Polyglot persistence, 10gen