Sencha Cordova Builder - Automated Builds for PhoneGap Projects

[bricemason]

Hey All,

I have been experimenting with Ant integration in the Sencha Touch build process lately. I'm totally new to Ant but quickly became excited by its capability.

As a way to dig in, I created a project that automates the creation, building, and running of Android and iOS enabled PhoneGap projects with Sencha Touch. My goal was to make something that worked with the framework and was as easy to use as possible without requiring any extra installs. I'd be glad to get some feedback on it. I have been using it for quick mockups and light development tasks.

You can check it out on github: https://github.com/bricemason/sencha-cordova-builder

I'll also do a screencast early next week to go over how to use it.

Brice

[mitchellsimoens]

Pretty nice!

[trinitrotoluen]

cool, It's gonna be very useful coz for now I more prefer using phonegap compared with sencha native packager. Waiting for the screencast

[bcichowlas]

This looks really useful, but I'm not sure that I completely understand. Can this be used with Sencha Architect/Touch 2.1 to make .api's that will run on IOS devices? I would really like a working example that I could examine carefully and model. Thanks.

[bcichowlas]

Just when I was about to give up for the time being, I managed to use Architect/Touch 2.1 to build one Sencha app and then another, rather than using PhoneGap. (I had originally shifted to PhoneGap because Architect was not packaging correctly for me, but now I know how to do it.)

There are simply a lot of details necessary to get the packager file right. When it is wrong, the error message can be quite obscure, sometimes consisting of just a number. Also, sometimes one sees seemingly contradictory messages in the output: one messages says packaging has failed, another says it has succeeded.

For me, here were some important points:

I had thought that Certificate alias was a path to my Certificate copy. That's wrong. It's a name for the *developer* certificate. If you are the only developer, you may be able to get away by just saying "iPhone Developer", but if you have several developer accounts on your machine you may need to say as much as iPhone Developer: Bruce Cichowlas (XLBH3396K5) . How did I find this out? Try saying just "iPhone Developer" and if it doesn't like it, it will say it is ambiguous and give you some idea of what it wants.

I also put my password on the next entry in the packager. I'm not sure that it was necessary and I'm not sure exactly which password it wanted.

I used "Production" for my Ad Hoc build, but maybe "Debug" would have worked.

Your application id must match what you set up at the Apple development site. In my case, it was com.realkeysmusic.divs . I used my Ad Hoc provision file (after setting up the UDID's etc. at the Apple developer site. I copied it to my project root directory (the one with app.html) and said ./Divs_Ad_Hoc.mobileprovision for provisionProfile.

So I ended up using the packager within Sencha Architect rather than using PhoneGap at all for IOS, even though it seemed OK for Android --- so in some ways this is not an answer to the question here but rather an alternative.

[bricemason]

Here's the screencast which runs through an example of setting up a project and building for both android and ios.

The goal of this project is to give a simple way to wrap a sencha touch 2.1 app with phonegap using the build process exposed by sencha cmd.

https://vimeo.com/56231285

Brice

[snam]

This is excellent material!!

Thanks for taking the time to put this ant script together.
And for the nicely done tutorial...

Keep up the good work.

Cheers

[azche]

This is great!

[Tioecomp]

Brice,

Your tutorial is very detailed, but I'm having problem to get it working on windows 7 with the path to the files, I tried C:\Users\Bernardo\Desktop\sencha-cordova-builder-master\build.cordova.xml and C:/Users/Bernardo/Desktop/sencha-cordova-builder-master/build.cordova.xml but at the build process the build.cordova.xml cant be found. Anyone have this working on windows 7?

[bricemason]

You're close. Assuming the project is extracted to your desktop, the path to the main build file would be:

C:/Users/Bernardo/Desktop/sencha-cordova-builder-master/build-cordova.xml

In addition to this you'll need to modify the path to the 'create' scripts in the cordova.properties file. Specifically, change:

cordova.ios.tools.bin.create=${cordova.ios.tools.bin}/create

to:

cordova.ios.tools.bin.create=${cordova.ios.tools.bin}/create.bat

and change:

cordova.android.tools.bin.create=${cordova.android.tools.bin}/create

to:

cordova.android.tools.bin.create=${cordova.android.tools.bin}/create.bat

I have had others report that they've used this on windows with success. I'll be including better out of the box support for windows very soon, probably the next week or two so be sure to check back for updates.

Brice