Instant PhoneGap Social App Development: Consume social network feeds and share social network content using native plugins and PhoneGap

Our app, called Socializer, will display the Twitter streams from five pre-set Twitter accounts. The user can then read these streams, and should they find an interesting tweet, they can tap on it to do more with it. For example, they may wish to view a link embedded in the tweet. More importantly, the end user may wish to share the information using Twitter, and the app will offer a Share button to do just that.

To accomplish this, we'll be working with Twitter's JSON API, a natural fit for an app already written largely in JavaScript. The only downside is that Twitter has a pretty low cap for rate-limiting API requests, so we'll also have to build some basic support for when this occurs. (For more information about rate-limiting, see https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting.) To be honest, this is far more likely to occur to us as a developer than the user, because we often reload the app to test a new feature, which incurs new API requests far faster than an end user would typically incur them.

We'll also introduce the concept of PhoneGap plugins, as we'll be using the ChildBrowser plugin, which is supported across both iOS and Android, and opens web content within the app, rather than outside the app. This is important, since once the user is outside the app, they may not return to the app.

This project is a great introduction to handling APIs using JSON, including Twitter's API. While we're using a very small subset of Twitter's API, the lessons learned in this project can be expanded to deal with the rest of the API. Furthermore, JSON APIs are all over the place, and learning how to deal with Twitter's API is a great way to learn how to deal with any JSON API.

We'll also be dealing with how to share content. To do this, we'll work with Twitter's Web Intents, a convenient and extremely simple method that allows sharing of content without messing with the account information or complicated code.

We'll also be working with PhoneGap plugins, which many apps will eventually require in one way or another. For example, our app should be able to handle links to external websites – the best way to do this is to have the ChildBrowser plugin handle it. This lets the user stay inside our app and easily return to our app when they are done. Without it, we'd be taking the user out of the app and into the default browser.

The app itself will also serve to introduce you to creating mobile apps using a simple framework named YASMF (Yet Another Simple, Mobile Framework). There are a multitude of fantastic frameworks out there (jQuery Mobile, jQuery Touch, iUI, Sencha Touch, and so on.), and the framework you choose to use ultimately doesn't really matter that much—they all do what they advertise—and our using a custom framework isn't intended to throw you off-kilter in any fashion. The main reason for using this particular custom framework is that it's very lightweight and simple; which means the concepts it uses will be easy to transfer to any framework. For more information regarding the framework, please visit https://github.com/photokandyStudios/YASMF/wiki.

To do this, we're going to break down the creation of our app into several different parts. We'll be focusing on the design of the app before we handle the implementation using the following:

The project thus created results in the following directory structure:

We'll begin with the start view. This will be a very simple view. It is entirely optional in this app as all we'll be doing is explaining the app and providing a way to move to the main view.

With that in mind, our sketch is shown in the following screenshot:

In the preceding image, we have a Start button (1) that will push the social view onto the view stack. We also have some explanatory text (2).

Our next view is the social view shown in the following screenshot:

The social view is essentially a list of tweets, one after the other. We'll display several tweets at a time, and as such, we'll have to deal with scrolling at some point. While you can use various libraries to accomplish this, we'll be using our own minimalist scrolling library.

Each tweet will consist of a profile image (1), the screen name and real name (if available) (2), and the text of the tweet (3). When the user taps a tweet, we'll transition to the tweet view.

At the bottom of the view (4), we have a series of profile images for five different Twitter accounts. The images will be retrieved from Twitter itself; we won't be storing the images ourselves. When an image is tapped, we'll load the respective Twitter stream.

Our tweet view looks like the following screenshot:

First, note that our tweet view repeats the tweet (1) that the user tapped on in the social view. The same information is repeated, but we also list the various web links (2) that the tweets might have, any hashtags (3), and any user mentions (4). Items (2) to (4) are intended to be tappable, that is, if a user taps on (2), they should be taken to the particular website. If they tap on (3), they should be taken back to the social view with a stream of tweets referencing the hashtag. The same should happen if they tap on (4), except that it would be that particular user's stream.

We also have a Back button in our navigation bar to takes the user back to the previous view, and a Share button (5) in our toolbar, when tapped, should display the ChildBrowser plugin with the Twitter Web Intent already displayed. If the user isn't logged in to Twitter, they'll be prompted to do so. Once logged in, they'll be given the tweet (which they can change to suit their needs), and they can then send it out to their followers. When complete, the user can close the ChildBrowser plugin and return to the app.

Now that we created our mockup, we need to define some of the resources we'll need. Let's open up our editing program and get busy designing our app.

The following screenshot is a pretty good representation of how our final product will look:

A lot of this can be accomplished using CSS. The background of the Twitter stream and the navigation bar are the only two components that will be difficult, so we should save those out to our www/images directory as Background.png and NavigationBar.png respectively. If you notice, both have a texture, so make sure to save them in a way that they will tile without visible seams.

For this task, we've defined how our UI should look, and the various interactions between widgets and views. We also generated a mockup of the app in our graphics editor and created some image resources for later use.

Let's take a look at our data model:

We'll be using TWITTER as the namespace and within it, we'll have two objects that we'll be using a lot: TwitterUser and TwitterStream. The idea behind TwitterUser is to be an instance of a particular user, which we'll be representing with an image on the toolbar in the streams view. The TwitterStream object will be a representation of a single stream.

Let's examine TwitterUser more closely. The object has two properties, screenName and userData. screenName holds the user's Twitter username. userData will hold the response from Twitter's API. It will have lots of different information about the user, including their profile image URL, their real name, and more.

The constructor will return an initialized TwitterUser based upon the supplied screen name. Internally, the constructor just calls the setScreenName() method which will request the user data from Twitter. The getScreenName() method simply returns the screen name. The getProfileImageUrl() method will return the URL to the user's profile image. The getUserData() will return the data that Twitter returned, and the getTimeline() method will create a TwitterStream object for the particular user.

The TwitterStream object operates on a similar idea: it will house the data returned by Twitter. The TwitterStream object also provides us the ability to get a stream for a particular user as well as the ability to return a stream for any search (such as a hashtag).

When constructed, we pass three options, the screen name or the search phrase, the maximum number of tweets to return (up to 200), and a function to call when the stream has finished loading.

The loadStream() method does the actual work of loading a Twitter stream based on the above options passed to the object when created. It gets called immediately upon construction of the object so that our app doesn't have to send a separate message asking for the stream to be loaded.

Some methods related to the properties in the object that we have are setScreenName(), setSearchPhrase(), getSearchPhrase(), setMaxCount(), getMaxCount() and getStream().

The setScreenName() method does the same thing as setting the searchPhrase() method except that it adds an @ character to the name. The loadStream() method can then decide which API to call when loading a stream, either calling the API to return the user's stream, or by calling the search API.

We created and defined our data model for our app. We've defined two objects, TwitterUser and TwitterStream, and saw how they interact.

We'll be creating two files, twitter.js and twitterUsers.js. Place these in the www/models directory.

Let's start with the twitter.js file:

var TWITTER = TWITTER || {};

As always, we define our namespace; in this case, TWITTER:

TWITTER._baseURL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/";
TWITTER._searchBase = "http://search.twitter.com/";

We define two variables global to the TWITTER namespace: _baseURL and _searchBase. These two URLs point at Twitter's JSON API; the first is for API requests such as user lookups, user streams, and such, while the latter is only for searching. We define them here for two reasons: to make the URLs a little less nasty in the following code, and if Twitter should ever decide to have a different version of the API (and you want to change it), you can do so here.

Next, we define our first object, TwitterUser using the following code snippet:

TWITTER.TwitterUser = function ( theScreenName, completion )
{
    var self = this;
    self._screenName = "";
    self._userData   = {};

We've defined our two properties here, _screenName and _userData. We're using underscores at the front to indicate that these are internal (private) variables that no outside object should access. Instead, an outside object should use the get/set methods we define next:

    self.getScreenName = function ()
    {
      return self._screenName;
    }

This one's simple enough, it just returns the private member when asked. But the next one's more complicated:

    self.setScreenName = function ( theScreenName, completion 
         )
    {
        self._screenName = theScreenName;

Like a normal set method, we've assigned theScreenName to _screenName. But when this happens, we want to load in the user information from Twitter. This is why it is important to have get/set methods in front of private methods; you might just need them to do something important when the value changes or is read.

        var getUserURL = TWITTER._baseURL + 
            "users/lookup.json?screen_name=" + 
            encodeURIComponent(theScreenName);

Here we've defined our URL that we're going to use to ask Twitter to look up the user in question. For more information about how this particular URL works, see the Twitter documentation at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/lookup. You can see a full example of what is returned at the bottom of the page.

We use the encodeURIComponent() method to ensure that the text is properly encoded (so that it can handle international characters).

Now that we have our URL, we're going to use another utility function defined for us in PKUTIL (www/framework/utility.js), called loadJSON(). It uses AJAX to send a request to the earlier URL, and Twitter then sends a response back, in the form of JSON. When it is finished, the function will call the completion function we're passing as the second parameter after getUserURL. This method can check if the request succeeded or not, and set any private members that are necessary. We'll also call the completion function passed to the setScreenName() method.

        PKUTIL.loadJSON ( getUserURL, function ( 
                success, data )
          {
            if (success)
            {
              self._userData = data;

If success is true, then the JSON has been properly returned and parsed into the data parameter. We just assign it to the private _userData member.

            }
            else
            {
              self._userData = { "error": "Twitter error; rate 
                  limited?" };

But, if the return value of success is false, then something's gone wrong. Anything could have happened. Twitter might be down (not unheard of), the network connection might have failed, or Twitter might have rate limited us. (For Twitter's error codes, see https://dev.twitter.com/docs/error-codes-responses.) For now, we're just going to assume the latter, but you could certainly build more complicated error-detection schemes to figure out the type of error.

          }
            if (completion)
            {
                completion ();
            }

Finally, regardless of success or failure, we call the completion function passed to us. This completion function is important so that we know when we can safely access the _userData member (via getUserData a little lower).

          }
        );
    }

    self.getProfileImageURL = function ()
    {
        if (self._userData[0])
        {
            return self._userData[0].profile_image_url;
        }
        return "";
    }

The method getProfileImageURL() is a convenience function that returns the user's profile image URL. This is a link to the avatar being used for Twitter. First we check to see if _userData[0] exists, and if it does, return profile_image_url, a value defined by the Twitter API. If it doesn't, we'll just return an empty string.

    self.getUserData = function ()
    {
        return self._userData;
    }

Next, the getUserData() method is used to return the _userData member. If it has been properly loaded, it will have a lot of values in it, all determined by Twitter. If it has failed to load, it'll have an error property in it, and if it hasn't been loaded at all, it'll be empty.

    self.getTimeline = function ( theMaxCount, completion )
    {
        return new TWITTER.TwitterStream ( "@" + 
            self._theScreenName, completion, theMaxCount || 25 
            );
    }

The getTimeline() method is also a convenience function used to get the timeline for the Twitter user. theMaxCount is the maximum number of tweets to return (up to 200), and completion is a function to call when it's all done. We do this by creating a new TwitterStream object (defined later) with the Twitter screen name prepended by an @ character.

If theMaxCount isn't specified, we use a little || trick to indicate the default value of 25 tweets.

    self.setScreenName ( theScreenName, completion );
}

The last thing we do is actually call the setScreenName() method with the screen name and completion function passed in to the constructor. If you remember your JavaScript, this whole function, while we can think of it as defining an object, is also the constructor of that object. In this case, as soon as you create the TwitterUser object, we'll fire off a request to Twitter to load in the user's data and set it to _userData.

Our next object is the TwitterStream object:

TWITTER.TwitterStream = function ( 
    theScreenNameOrSearchPhrase, completion, theMaxCount )
{
    var self = this;

    self._searchPhrase = "";
    self._stream     = {};
    self._theMaxCount   = 25;

Here we've defined three properties, _searchPhrase, _stream, and _theMaxCount. The _searchPhrase property can either be the screen name of a user or a literal search term, such as a hashtag. The _stream property is the actual collection of tweets obtained from Twitter, and the _theMaxCount property is the maximum number of tweets to ask for. (Keep in mind that Twitter is free to return less than this amount.)

You may ask why we're storing either a search phrase or a screen name. The reason is that we're attempting to promote some code re-use. It's logical to assume that a Twitter stream is a Twitter stream, regardless of how it was found, either by asking for a particular user's stream or by searching for a word. Fair assumption, right?

Yeah, but totally wrong, too. The streams are close enough so that we can work around the differences, but still, not the same. So, even though we're treating them here as one-and-the-same, they really aren't – at least until Twitter decides to change their Search API to better match their non-Search API.

    self.setMaxCount = function ( theMaxCount )
    {
        self._theMaxCount = theMaxCount;
    }

    self.getMaxCount = function ()
    {
        return self._theMaxCount;
    }

Here we have the get/set methods for the _theMaxCount property. All we do is set and retrieve the value. One thing to note is that this should be called before we actually load a stream. This value is part of the ultimate URL we sent to Twitter.

    self.setScreenName = function ( theScreenName )
    {
        self._searchPhrase = "@" + theScreenName;
    }
    
    self.setSearchPhrase = function ( theSearchPhrase )
    {
        self._searchPhrase = theSearchPhrase;
    }
    self.getSearchPhrase = function ()
    {
        return self._searchPhrase;
    }

Notice that we have two set methods that act on the _searchPhrase property while we only have one get method. What we're doing here is permitting someone to call the setScreenName() method without the @ character. The _searchPhrase property will then be set with the @ character prepended to the screen name. The next set method (setSearchPhrase()) is intended to be used when setting real search terms (such as a hashtag).

Internally, we'll use the @ character at the front to mean something special, but you'll see that in a second.

    self.getStream = function ()
    {
        return self._stream;
    }

The getStream() method just returns the _stream property, which if we haven't loaded, will be blank. So let's look at the loadStream() method:

    self.loadStream = function ( completion )
    {
        var theStreamURL;
        var forScreenName = false;

The loadStream() method takes a completion function. We'll call this at the end of the operation no matter what; it lets the rest of our code know when it is safe to access the _stream member via the getStream() method.

The other component is the forScreenName variable; if true, we'll be asking Twitter for the stream that belongs to the screen name stored in the _searchPhrase property. Otherwise, we'll ask Twitter to do an actual search for the _searchPhrase property:

        if (self._searchPhrase.substr(0,1)=="@")
        {
           theStreamURL = TWITTER._baseURL + 
            "statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=
             true&include_rts=true&count=" +
             self._theMaxCount + "&screen_name=" + 
                encodeURIComponent(self._searchPhrase);
             forScreenName = true;
        }
        else
        {
            theStreamURL = TWITTER._searchBase + 
                "search.json?q=" + 
                encodeURIComponent(self._searchPhrase) + 
                "&include_entities=true" + 
                "&include_rts=true&rpp=" + self._theMaxCount;
            forScreenName = false;
        }

All we've done so far is defined the theStreamURL property to point either at the Search API (for a search term) or the non-Search API (for a screen name's stream). Next we'll load it with the loadJSON() method using the following code snippet:

        PKUTIL.loadJSON ( theStreamURL, function (success, 
           data)
          {
            if (success)
            {
              if (forScreenName)
              {
                self._stream = data;
              }
              else
              {
                self._stream = data.results;
              }
            }

Here's another reason why we need to know if we're processing for a screen name or for a search: the JSON we get back is slightly different. When searching, Twitter helpfully includes other information (such as the time it took to execute the search). In our case, we're not interested in anything but the results, hence the two separate code paths.

          else
            {
              self._stream = { "error": "Twitter error; rate 
                  limited?" };
             }

Again, if we have a failure, we're assuming that we are rate-limited.

             if (completion)
             {
               completion( self._stream );
             }

When done, we call the completion method, helpfully passing along the data stream.

             }
        );
    }
    self.setSearchPhrase ( theScreenNameOrSearchPhrase );
    self.setMaxCount ( theMaxCount || 25 );
    self.loadStream ( completion );
}

Just like at the end of the previous object, we call some methods at the end of this object too. First we set the incoming search phrase, then we set the maximum number of tweets to return (or 25, if it isn't given to us), and then we call the loadStream() method with the completion function. This means that the moment we create a new TwitterStream object, it's already working on loading all the tweets we'll be wanting to have access to.

We've taken care of almost all our data model requirements, but we've got just a little bit left to do in the twitterUsers.js file; use the following instruction:

TWITTER.users = Array();

First, we create a users() array in the Twitter namespace. We're going to use this to store our predefined Twitter users, which will be loaded with the following loadTwitterUsers() method:

TWITTER.loadTwitterUsers = function ( completion )
{
  TWITTER.users.push ( new TWITTER.TwitterUser ( "photoKandy"  , function () 
    { TWITTER.users.push ( new TWITTER.TwitterUser ( "CNN"  , 
    function ()
      { TWITTER.users.push ( new TWITTER.TwitterUser ( 
      "BBCWorld" , function ()
        { TWITTER.users.push ( new TWITTER.TwitterUser ( 
        "espn", function ()
          { TWITTER.users.push ( new TWITTER.TwitterUser ( 
          "lemondefr", completion ) ); }
          ) ); }
        ) ) ; }
      ) ) ; }
    ) ) ;
}

What we've done here is essentially just chained together five requests for five different Twitter accounts. You can store these in an array and ask for them all at once. But for this our app needs to know when they've all been loaded. You could also do this by using recursion through an array of users, but we'll leave it as an example to you, the reader.

We have implemented our data model and predefined the five Twitter accounts we want to use. We also went over the loadJSON() method in PKUTIL, which helps with the entire process. We've also been introduced to the Twitter API.

Before we go on, let's take a look at the loadJSON() method you've been introduced to. It's been added to this project's www/framework/utility.js file, as shown in the following code block:

PKUTIL.loadJSON = function ( theURL, completion )
{
  PKUTIL.load( theURL, true, function ( success, data )
    {

First off, this is a pretty simple function to begin with. What we're really doing is utilizing the PKUTIL.load() method (explained later) to do the hard work of calling out to the URL and passing us the response, but when the response is received, it's going to be coming back to us in the data variable.

      var theParsedData = {};

The theParsedData variable will store the actual JSON data, fully parsed.

      if (success)
      {
        try
        {
          theParsedData = JSON.parse ( data );

If the URL returns something successfully, we try to parse the data. Assuming it is a valid JSON string, it'll be put into theParsedData. If it isn't, the JSON.parse() method will throw an exception as follows:

        }
          catch (err)
        {
          console.log ("Failed to parse JSON from " + theURL);
          success = COMPLETION_FAILURE;
        }

Any exceptions will be logged to the console, and we'll end up telling our completion function that the request failed:

      }
      if (completion)
      {
        completion (success, theParsedData);
      }

At the end, we call the completion function and tell it if the request failed or succeeded, and what the JSON data was (if successfully parsed).

    }
  );
}

The PKUTIL.load() method is another interesting beast (for full implementation details, visit https://github.com/photokandyStudios/YASMF/blob/master/framework/utility.js#L126). It's defined as follows:

PKUTIL.load = function ( theFileName, aSync, completion )
{

First, we'll check to see if the browser understands XMLHttpRequest. If it doesn't, we'll have to call the completion function with a failure notice and a message describing how we couldn't load anything. This is shown in the following code block:

  if (!window.XMLHttpRequest) 
  { 
    if (completion) 
    {
      completion ( PKUTIL.COMPLETION_FAILURE,
                   "This browser does not support 
                    XMLHttpRequest." );
      return;
    }
  }

Next we set up the XMLHttpRequest() method, and assign the onreadystatechange function as shown in the following code snippet:

  var r = new XMLHttpRequest();
  r.onreadystatechange = function()
  {

This function can be called many times during the loading process, so we check for a specific value. In this case, 4 in the following code snippet means that the content has been loaded:

    if (r.readyState == 4)
    {

Of course, just because we got data doesn't mean that it is useable data; we need to verify the status of the load, and here we get into a little bit of murky territory. iOS defines success with a zero value, while Android defines it with 200, as shown in the following code snippet:

      if ( r.status==200 || r.status == 0)
      {

If we've successfully loaded the data, we'll call the completion function with a success notification and the data:

        if (completion)
        {
          completion ( PKUTIL.COMPLETION_SUCCESS,
                       r.responseText );
        }
      }

But, if we've failed to load the data, we call the completion function with a failure notification and the status value of the load:

      else
      {
        if (completion)
        {
          completion ( PKUTIL.COMPLETION_FAILURE,
                       r.status );
        }
      }
    }
  }

Keep in mind that we're still just setting up the XMLHttpRequest object; we've not actually triggered the load yet.

The next step is to specify the path to the file, and here we run into a problem on WP7 versus Android and iOS. On both Android and iOS we can load files relative to the index.html file, but on WP7, we have to load them relative to the /app/www directory. Subtle to track down, but critically important. Even though we aren't supporting WP7 in this book, the framework does, and so it needs to handle cases such as the following:

  if (device.platform=="WinCE")
  {
    r.open ('GET', "/app/www/" + theFileName, aSync); 
  }
  else
  {
    r.open ('GET', theFileName, aSync); 
  }

Now that we've set the filename, we fire off the load:

  r.send ( null );
      
}

If you haven't already, you should download the entire community PhoneGap plugin repository located at https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-plugins. This will provide you nearly all the content necessary to use the plugins.

We're going to split this one up into what we have to do for each platform as the steps and environments are all quite different.

We've not actually dealt with how to use the plugin we just installed. We'll be dealing with that as we come to the necessary steps when implementing our project. But there is one important detail to pay attention to—the plugin's readme file, if available.

This file will often indicate the installation steps necessary, or any quirks that you might need to watch out for. The proper use of the plugin is also usually detailed. Unfortunately, some plugins don't come with instructions; at that point, the best thing to do is to try installing it in the normal fashion (as we've done earlier for the ChildBrowser plugin) and see if it works.

The other thing to remember is that PhoneGap is an ongoing project. This means that there are plugins that are out-of-date (and indeed, some have had to be updated by the author for this book) and won't work correctly with the most recent versions of PhoneGap. You'll need to pay attention to the plugins so that you know which version it supports, and if it needs to be modified to work with a newer version of PhoneGap. Modifications usually aren't terribly difficult, but it does involve getting into the native code, so you may wish to ask the community (located at http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap) for any help in the modification.

With all the discussed points in mind, let's create our start view, which should be named startView.html in the www/views directory, as shown in the following code block:

<div class="viewBackground">
  <div class="navigationBar">
    <div id="startView_AppTitle"></div>
    <button class="barButton" id="startView_startButton" style="right:10px"></button>
  </div>
  <div class="content avoidNavigationBar" id="startView_welcome">
  </div>
</div>

This code snippet looks similar like our view template defined earlier except that we're missing a back button and a toolbar. The first is due to the fact that the first view we display to the user doesn't have anything to go back to, so we omit that button. Views don't have to have toolbars, so we're omitting it here. The id values have also changed to include the name of our view.

None of this defines what our view will look like, though. To determine that, we need to override our framework styles in www/framework/base.css by setting them in www/style/style.css.

First, we define the look of the navigationBar class, we use the glossy black bar from our template defined earlier in this chapter, as shown in the following code snippet:

.navigationBar
{
  background-image: url(../images/NavigationBar.png);
  color: #FFF;
  background-color: transparent;
  border-top-left-radius: 10px;
  border-top-right-radius: 10px;
  z-index:1;
  box-shadow: 0px 3px 10px #888;
}

The view's background is defined as follows:

.viewBackground
{
  border-radius: 10px;
  background-color: #000;
}

The toolbar is defined similar to the navigation bar as follows:

.toolBar
{
  background-color: #628799;
}

The content area has a textured background, which is defined as follows:

.content
{
  background-image: url(../images/Background.png);
  background-repeat: repeat;
  background-size: 50% 50%;
  color: #333;
}

There rest of the styling is related to specific items in our app (such as avatars), shown as follows:

.toolBar .profileImage
{
  width: 32px;
  height: 32px;
  display: inline-block;
  line-height: 44px;
  margin-left:10px;
  margin-right:10px;
  background-size: 32px 32px;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  margin-top: 6px;
}

.twitterItem
{
  height: auto;
  padding:10px;
  padding-bottom: 20px;
  background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,0.5), rgba(0,0,0,0.25) );
  background-repeat: repeat-y;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #000;
}

.twitterItem img
{
  float: left;
  margin-right:10px;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
}

.twitterName
{
  height: 32px;
  line-height: 32px;
}

.twitterRealName
{
  font-weight: bold;
}

.twitterScreenName
{
  color: #888;
}

.twitterTweet
{
  margin-top:10px;
  height: auto;
}

.twitterEntities .entity
{
  height:auto; 
  position: relative;
  margin-top:10px;
  border-radius: 10px;
  border: 1px solid #888;
  background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.25);
  padding:10px;
}

.twitterEntities A, .twitterEntities A:visited, .twitterEntities A:link, .twitterEntities A:hover
{
 text-decoration: none;
}

.twitterEntities A.touched
{
  text-decoration: underline;
  text-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #FFF;
}

.twitterEntities .entity.hash, .twitterEntities .entity.user
{
  display: inline-block;
  margin-right:10px;
}

.twitterEntities .entity.hash A
{
  color: #800 !important;
}

.twitterEntities .entity.user A
{
  color: #080 !important;
}

.twitterEntities .entity.url
{
  display: block;
}

.twitterEntities .entity.url A
{
  color: #008 !important;
 display: block;
}

That's everything needed to make our start view start to look like a real app. Of course, there's a lot of pre-built stuff in www/framework/base.css, which you're welcome to analyze and reuse in your own projects.

Now that we've defined the view and the appearance, we need to define some of the view's content. We're going to do this by using a hidden div class as shown in the following code snippet:

<div id="startView_welcome_en" class="hidden">
  <h2>PhoneGap Hotshot Sample Application</h2>
  <h3>Chapter 2: Let's Get Social</h3>
  <p>This application demonstrates interaction
    with a social network (Twitter), includingthe following items:
  </p>
    <ul>
      <li>Retrieving information about users</li>
      <li>Displaying a specific user's stream</li>
      <li>Searching Twitter for a specific hashtag</li>
      <li>Displaying external webpages in a Child Browser</li>
      <li>Using Twitter Web Intents to share to your followers on Twitter</li>
    </ul>
</div>

This div block is classed as hidden so that it won't be visible to the user. We'll then use some JavaScript to copy the content to the content area inside the view.

Next comes the JavaScript shown as follows:

<script>
  
  var startView = $ge("startView") || {};  // properly namespace

Our first act is to put all our script into a namespace. Unlike most of our other namespace definitions, we're actually going to piggyback onto the startView element (which the astute reader will notice has not been defined yet; that'll be near the end of this chapter). While the element is a proper DOM element, it also serves a perfect place for us to attach to, as long as we avoid any of the cardinal sins of using DOM method names as our own which, I promise, we won't do.

You might be wondering what $ge does. Since we're not including any JavaScript framework such as jQuery, we don't have a convenience method to get an element by its ID. jQuery does this with $(), and because you might actually be using jQuery along with the framework we're using, I chose to use $ge(), short for get element. It's defined in www/framework/utility.js as shown in the following code snippet. All it does is act as a shortened version of document.getElementById.

function $ge ( elementId )
{
  return document.getElementById ( elementId );
}

Back to our start view script, we define what needs to happen when the view is initialized. Here we hook into the various buttons and other interface elements that are in the view, as well as localize all the text and content as shown in the following code snippet:

  startView.initializeView = function() {
    startView.applicationTitleImage = $ge("startView_AppTitle");
    startView.applicationTitleImage.innerHTML = __T("APP_TITLE");

This is our first use of the __T() method. Using this method is how we can properly localize an image or text. Of course, we're using English as the language for this app, but it never hurts to prepare for localization and globalization by building it in from the start. If you want to know more about how the framework supports internationalization, visit https://github.com/photokandyStudios/YASMF/wiki/PKLOC. We can localize our start button using the following code lines:

    startView.startButton = $ge("startView_startButton");
    startView.startButton.innerHTML = __T("START");

Now we've properly localized our start button, but how do we make it do anything? For this we can use a little function defined in www/framework/ui-core.js called PKUI.CORE.addTouchListener() as shown in following code block:

    PKUI.CORE.addTouchListener(startView.startButton, "touchend", startView.startApp);

Finally we need to display the correct welcome text in the content area as follows:

    var theWelcomeContent = $geLocale("startView_welcome");
    $ge("startView_welcome").innerHTML = theWelcomeContent.innerHTML;

  }

Next up in our start view script, we have the function that is called whenever the start button is tapped, as seen in the following code block:

startView.startApp = function() {
    PKUI.CORE.pushView(socialView);
  }
  
</script>

Real short, but packs a punch. This code block displays our social view to the player, which actually starts the app. If you want to know more about how the pushView() method works, visit https://github.com/photokandyStudios/YASMF/wiki/PKUI.CORE.pushView.

Whew! That was a lot of work for a pretty simple view. Thankfully, most of the work is actually done by the framework, so our actual startView.html file is pretty small.

It probably doesn't take much to guess, but there's several complementary functions to the pushView() method – popView, showView, and hideView.

The popView function does the exact opposite of pushView. It moves the views right (instead of left) by popping them off the view stack.

The showView and hideView functions do essentially the same thing, but simpler. They don't do any animation at all. Furthermore, since they don't involve any other view on the stack, they are most useful at the beginning of an app when we have to figure out how to display our very first view with no previous view to animate.

If you want to know more about view management, you might want to visit https://github.com/photokandyStudios/YASMF/wiki/Understanding-the-View-Stack-and-View-Management and explore https://github.com/photokandyStudios/YASMF/wiki/PKUI.CORE.

Go ahead and create the socialView.html file now based on ours. Then we'll go over the portions you haven't seen before.

When we're finished with this task, we should have a view that looks like the following screenshot for iOS:

The view for Android will look like the following screenshot:

As with all our views to this point, we're going to start with the HTML portion that describes the actual view as follows:

<div class="viewBackground">
 <div class="navigationBar">
  <div id="socialView_title"></div>
  <button class="barButton backButton"   
      id="socialView_backButton" style="left:10px" ></button>
 </div>
 <div class="content avoidNavigationBar avoidToolBar" 
     style="padding:0; overflow: scroll;" 
     id="socialView_scroller">
   <div id="socialView_contentArea" style="padding: 0; 
     height: auto; position: relative;">
   </div>
 </div>
 <div class="toolBar" id="socialView_toolbar" style="text-
      align: center">
 </div>
</div>

Generally, nothing is too difficult here. We've added a style to the inner div block. This takes away our default div styling (from www/framework/base.css) and forces the height to fit to the content (instead of to the screen). This means that when we want to scroll, we'll have the whole content to scroll through.

Speaking of scrolling, in a perfect world, we could just rely on overflow:scroll to work on all our platforms, but that doesn't always work out well. We can rely on native scrolling in iOS 5, but that has its own share of problems, and rules out any lower platform, and of course, it doesn't work on Android at any version. So for iOS and Android we'll have to use our own implementation for scrolling or use a third party scrolling library such as iScroll 4. In this case, we're using our own implementation, which we'll cover a little later.

First, we need to determine how our toolbar will show its profile images using the following template:

<div class="hidden" id="socialView_profileImageIcon">
 <a class="profileImage" style="background-
     image:url(%PROFILE_IMAGE_URL%)"
   href="javascript:socialView.loadStreamFor
     ('@%SCREEN_NAME%');"></a>
</div>

Note that we have a little bit of JavaScript that fires when the user touches the image. This is to load the appropriate stream for that image.

Next we need to define what the tweets should look like within our view using the following code snippet:

<div class="hidden" id="socialView_twitterTemplate">
 <div class="twitterItem" onclick="socialView.selectTweet(%INDEX%);">
  <img src="%PROFILE_IMAGE_URL%" width=32 height=32 border=0  
   />
  <div class="twitterName">
   <span class="twitterRealName">%REAL_NAME%</span>
   <span class="twitterScreenName">@%SCREEN_NAME%</span>
  </div>
  <div class="twitterTweet">%TWEET%</div>
 </div>
</div>

In this segment of HTML, we've defined what the rest of a tweet should look like. We've given every div and span a class so that we can target them in our style.css file (located in www/style). That is mainly to keep the display of the tweet as separate from the content of the tweet as possible, and to make it easy to change the look of a tweet whenever we want. Go ahead and take a look at the style.css file to get a good idea of how they will work to give our tweets some style.

Next up, our code:

  var socialView = $ge("socialView") || {};
  socialView.firstTime = true;
  socialView.currentStream = {}; 
  socialView.lastScrollTop = 0;
  socialView.myScroll = {};

As always, we give ourselves a namespace, in this case socialView. We also declare a few properties—firstTime, which will track if this is the first time our view is being displayed or not, and currentStream, which will hold the current visible stream from Twitter. The lastScrollTop property will record the position the user has scrolled to on our current page so we can restore it when they return from looking at an individual tweet, and myScroll will hold our actual scroller as seen in the following code block:

  socialView.initializeView = function ()
  {
    PKUTIL.include ( ["./models/twitterStreams.js", 
        "./models/twitterStream.js"], function ()
                     {
                        // load our toolbar
                        TWITTER.loadTwitterUsers ( 
                        socialView.initializeToolbar );
                     }
                   );

    socialView.viewTitle = $ge("socialView_title");
    socialView.viewTitle.innerHTML = __T("APP_TITLE");

    socialView.backButton = $ge("socialView_backButton");
    socialView.backButton.innerHTML = __T("BACK");
    PKUI.CORE.addTouchListener(socialView.backButton, 
        "touchend", function () { PKUI.CORE.popView(); });

    if (device.platform != "WinCE")
    {
        socialView.myScroll = new SCROLLER. 
            GenericScroller ('socialView_contentArea');
    }    
    
  }

Our initializeView() method isn't terribly complicated. We've highlighted a couple of lines in the code snippet. However, note that we load our models and when they are complete, we call the TWITTER.loadTwitterUsers() method. We pass along a completion function, which we define next so that when Twitter has returned the user data for all five of our Twitter users, we can call it.

We've also defined our scroller; if you want to see the complete code take a look in www/framework/scroller.js, but suffice it to say, it is a reasonably nice scroller that is simple to use. It doesn't beat native scrolling, but nothing will. You're free to replace it with any library you'd like, but for the purposes of this project, we've gone this route.

  socialView.initializeToolbar = function ()
  {
    
    var toolbarHtml = "";
    var profileImageTemplate = 
        $ge("socialView_profileImageIcon").innerHTML;
    var users = TWITTER.users;
    
    if (users.error)
    {
        console.log (streams.error);
        alert ("Rate limited. Please try again later.");
    }

One of the first things we do after obtaining the template's HTML is to check on our TWITTER.users array. This array should have been filled with all sorts of user data, but if Twitter has rate-limited us for some reason, it may not be. So we check to see if there is an error condition, and if so, we let the user know. Granted, it's not the best method to let a user know, but for our example app, it suffices.

    // go through each stream and request the profile image
    for (var i=0; i<users.length; i++)
    {
        var theTemplate = profileImageTemplate.replace 
           ("%SCREEN_NAME%", users[i].getScreenName())
                          .replace ("%PROFILE_IMAGE_URL%", 
                             users[i].getProfileImageURL());
        toolbarHtml += theTemplate;
    }

Next, we iterate through each of the users. There should be five users, but you could configure it for a different number and build up an HTML string that we'll put into the toolbar as follows:

    $ge("socialView_toolbar").innerHTML = toolbarHtml;
  }

Our next function, loadStreamFor() does the real hard work in this view. It requests a stream from Twitter and then processes it for display; this can be seen in the following code block:

  socialView.loadStreamFor = function ( searchPhrase )
  {
    var aStream = new TWITTER.TwitterStream ( searchPhrase, 
    function ( theStream )
      {

Something that we need to note here is that we are now inside the completion function – the function that will be called when the Twitter stream is obtained.

        var theTweetTemplate = 
           $ge("socialView_twitterTemplate").innerHTML;
        var theContentArea = $ge("socialView_contentArea");
        var theStreamHTML = "";
        

        if (theStream.error)
        {
            console.log (theStream.error);
            alert ("Rate limited. Please try again later.");
        }

Because Twitter may rate-limit us at any time, we check again for any error in the stream.

        for (var i=0; i<theStream.length; i++)
        {
          var theTweet = theStream[i];
          var theTemplate = 
              theTweetTemplate.replace("%INDEX%", i)
                           .replace ("%PROFILE_IMAGE_URL%",  
                            theTweet.profile_image_url ||    
                            theTweet.user.profile_image_url)
                           .replace ("%REAL_NAME%", 
                            theTweet.from_user || 
                            theTweet.user.name)
                           .replace ("%SCREEN_NAME%", 
                            theTweet.from_user || 
                            theTweet.user.screen_name)
                           .replace ("%TWEET%", 
                            theTweet.text);
          theStreamHTML += theTemplate;
        }

Here we're iterating through each item in the stream and building up a large HTML string from the template we defined earlier.

One important thing to notice is how we're obtaining the data of the tweet using theTweet.from_user || theTweet.user.screen_name. This is to deal with how Twitter returns a slightly different data format when searching for a word or a hashtag versus the data format when returning a user's timeline. Should one of them be undefined, we'll be loading the other, and since we can only get one of them, it's easier than building a lot of if statements to take care of it.

        theContentArea.innerHTML = theStreamHTML;
        socialView.currentStream = theStream;
        if (socialView.myScroll.scrollTo)
        {
            socialView.myScroll.scrollTo ( 0, 0 );
        }

Once our stream HTML is built, we assign it to the content area so that the user can see it. We also store the stream into the currentStream property so that we can reference it later. When that's done, we scroll to the top of the page so that the user can see the most recent tweets.

}
      , 100
    );
  }

You may wonder, what is that last 100? Well, it's actually a part of the call to the TwitterStream() method. It's the number of items to return in the stream.

Our next function deals with what should happen when a user taps on a displayed tweet:

  socialView.selectTweet = function ( theIndex )
  {
     var theTweet = socialView.currentStream[theIndex];
     tweetView.setTweet ( theTweet );
     PKUI.CORE.pushView ( tweetView );
  }

This function is pretty simple – all we do is tell the tweet view what tweet was tapped, and then push it on to the view stack.

  socialView.viewWillAppear = function ()
  {
    document.addEventListener("backbutton", 
        socialView.backButtonPressed, false );
    if (socialView.firstTime)
    {
        socialView.loadStreamFor ( "@photokandy" ); 
        socialView.firstTime = false;
    }
    if (socialView.myScroll.scrollTo)
    {
      PKUTIL.delay ( 50, function ()
        {
          socialView.myScroll.scrollTo ( 0, 
             socialView.lastScrollTop );
        }
      );
    }
  }

In the viewWillAppear() method we're checking if this is the first time the view has been displayed. If it is, we want to load a default stream for the user. Remember, until now we've only loaded a stream when the user taps on a profile image in the toolbar. But we don't want to reload this stream every time our view displays. We could be coming back from the tweet view and the user might want to continue where they left off in the previous stream. In the final portion, we're checking to see if we had a previous scroll position, and if so, we scroll the view to that point. We have to make a delay here since if we set it too early, the view will be offscreen (and won't scroll), or it will be onscreen, and it'll be noticeable to the user.

The remaining two functions, viewWillHide() and backButtonPressed() are pretty simple, so while you do need them in your code, we won't go over them here.

That's it! Not terribly difficult, but it does what we need. It displays a list of tweets. Once a user taps on the tweet, they'll be taken to the tweet view to do more, and that's what we'll look at in the next task.

In this task, we defined the HTML code and templates for our social view. We also used the Twitter stream data to construct a Twitter stream that the end user can interact with.

Go ahead and create your www/tweetView.html file based on ours. We'll go over the code that is new, while leaving the rest for you to review.

For this next task, we should end up with a view that looks like the following screenshot on an iOS:

The view for Android will look like the following screenshot:

This time, we're not going to display the HTML for defining the layout of our view. You may ask why? This is because you've seen it several times before and can look it up in the code for this project. We're going to start with the templates that will define the content instead:

<div class="hidden" id="tweetView_tweetTemplate">
 <div class="twitterItem" onclick="tweetView.selectTweet(%INDEX%);">
  <img src="%PROFILE_IMAGE_URL%" width=64 height=64 
   border=0 />
  <div class="twitterRealName">%REAL_NAME%</div>
  <div class="twitterScreenName">@%SCREEN_NAME%</div>
  <div class="twitterTweet">%TWEET%</div>
  <div class="twitterEntities">%ENTITIES%</div>
 </div>
</div>

This code is pretty similar to the template in the previous view with a couple of exceptions. One exception is that we've made the profile image larger, and the second is that we've added a div class that lists all the entities in the tweet. Twitter defines an entity as a URL, a hashtag, or a mention of another twitter user. We'll display any of these that are in a tweet so that the user can tap on them to get more information.

The following code snippet shows our template for any entity. Notice that we've given it the class of entity so that all our entities can have a similar appearance:

<div class="hidden" id="tweetView_entityTemplate">
  <DIV class="entity %TYPE%">%ENTITY%</DIV>
</div>

Next up, we define what each particular entity looks like; in this case, the URL template as seen in the following code snippet:

<div class="hidden" id="tweetView_urlEntityTemplate">
 <a href="javascript:PKUTIL.showURL('%URL%');" 
  class="openInNewWindow url" target="_blank">%DISPLAYURL%</a>
</div>

Note the use of PKUTIL.showURL() in this template. This is a convenience method we've defined in PKUTIL to use ChildBrowser to show a webpage. We've done the work of combining how it works on each platform and put it into one function so that it is easy to call. We'll take a look at it a little later.

Refer to the following code block:

<div class="hidden" id="tweetView_hashEntityTemplate">
 <a href="javascript:socialView.loadStreamFor('%23%HASHTAG%'); 
  PKUI.CORE.popView();" class="hash">#%TEXT%</a>
</div>

This template is for a hashtag. The big difference between this and the previous template is that it is actually referring back to our previous view! It does this to tell it to load a stream for the hashtag, and then we call the popView() method to go back to the view. Chances are the view won't have loaded the information from Twitter just yet, but give it a second and it'll reload with the new stream.

Similarly, the code for a mention is as follows:

<div class="hidden" id="tweetView_userEntityTemplate">
 <a href="javascript:socialView.loadStreamFor('@%USER%'); 
  PKUI.CORE.popView();" class="user" >@%TEXT%</a>
</div>

So that defines how our tweet looks and works; let's see how the view actually creates the tweet itself:

  var tweetView = $ge("tweetView") || {};
  tweetView.theTweet = {};
  tweetView.setTweet = function ( aTweet )
  {
      tweetView.theTweet = aTweet;
  }

Here, we've defined the setTweet() method which stores a given tweet into our theTweet property. Remember, this is called from the Twitter stream view when a tweet is tapped to send us the tweet to display.

The next method of interest is loadTweet(). We'll skip the initializeView() method as it is similar to the previous view. The loadTweet() method can be seen in the following code block:

  tweetView.loadTweet = function ()
  {
    var theTweet = tweetView.theTweet;
    
    var theTweetTemplate = 
        $ge("tweetView_tweetTemplate").innerHTML;
    var theEntityTemplate = 
        $ge("tweetView_entityTemplate").innerHTML;
    var theURLEntityTemplate = 
        $ge("tweetView_urlEntityTemplate").innerHTML;
    var theHashEntityTemplate = 
        $ge("tweetView_hashEntityTemplate").innerHTML;
    var theUserEntityTemplate = 
        $ge("tweetView_userEntityTemplate").innerHTML;

First, we obtain the HTML for each template we need – and there are several!

    var theContentArea = $ge("tweetView_contentArea");
    var theTweetHTML = "";
    var theEntitiesHTML = "";    

    var theURLEntities = theTweet.entities.urls;
    for (var i=0;i<theURLEntities.length;i++)
    {
        var theURLEntity = theURLEntities[i];
        theEntitiesHTML += theEntityTemplate.replace 
                                 ("%TYPE%", "url")
                                .replace ("%ENTITY%",
            theURLEntityTemplate.replace ("%URL%", 
                                 theURLEntity.url )
                                .replace ("%DISPLAYURL%", 
                                 theURLEntity.display_url )
                           );
    }

In this code, we've gone through every URL entity that Twitter has sent us and added it to our entity HTML string. We'll repeat that for hashtags and for mentions, but the code is so similar that we won't repeat it here.

    var theTemplate = theTweetTemplate
                      .replace ("%PROFILE_IMAGE_URL%", 
                       theTweet.profile_image_url || 
                       theTweet.user.profile_image_url)
                      .replace ("%REAL_NAME%", 
                       theTweet.from_user || 
                       theTweet.user.name)
                      .replace ("%SCREEN_NAME%", 
                       theTweet.from_user || 
                       theTweet.user.screen_name)
                      .replace ("%TWEET%", theTweet.text)
                      .replace ("%ENTITIES%", theEntitiesHTML );
    theTweetHTML += theTemplate;        
    theContentArea.innerHTML = theTweetHTML;

Once we've gone through all the entities, we handle the tweet itself. Note that we had to handle the entities first because we handled the substitution earlier. Just like the previous view, we correctly handle the tweet if it is from a search or from a timeline as well.

The next method of interest is the share() method, so we'll skip over the viewWillAppear(), viewWillHide(), and backButtonPressed() methods. It should suffice to say, the only different thing the viewWIllAppear() method does than any of the others is call the loadTweet() method to display the tweet when our view is shown.

The share() method is where we call Twitter's Web Intents, as shown in the following code snippet:

tweetView.share = function() {
  PKUTIL.showURL("https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=" + encodeURIComponent(tweetView.theTweet.text) + "%20(via%20" + encodeURIComponent("@" + (tweetView.theTweet.from_user || tweetView.theTweet.user.screen_name)) + ")");
}

Remember that the showURL() method is a convenience method to open the ChildBrowser plugin with a specific URL. The URL we are creating has the following components:

The idea here is to generate a tweet that looks something like the following:

A tweet that I'm going to tweet to my followers (via @someone)

When added together, the user will be able to go through the following flow to tweet anything they want:

First, if they aren't already logged in to Twitter, they'll be asked to do so, as in the following screenshot:

Next, they'll be presented with the tweet they selected, and will be provided with the opportunity to change it if they want, as in this next screenshot:

After the tweet has been sent, they will see the following screen:

We displayed a single tweet and processed the various entities within it. We demonstrated loading an external site in the ChildBrowser plugin by using PKUTIL.showURL(). We also demonstrated how to use the Twitter Web Intents to share a tweet.

Let's take a quick look at PKUTIL.showURL(); this method is used to display a ChildBrowser plugin with an external site. It's a pretty simple function, but since it takes three different ways to show the ChildBrowser plugin, we packaged it up into a function that makes it easy to use, as seen in the following code block:

PKUTIL.showURL = function ( theURL )
{
    switch (device.platform)
    {
case "Android":
        window.plugins.childBrowser.showWebPage( theURL );
        break;

For Android, it's simple to call ChildBrowser. Typically the following code snippet shows how you can call any plugin you want to use in PhoneGap:

default:
        cordova.exec("ChildBrowserCommand.showWebPage", 
            theURL);
    }
}

And for iOS, it's very similar to Android's method, except we call it directly instead of using window.plugins.childBrowser.showWebPage.

Well, you've done it! You've successfully written an app that displays information obtained from Twitter and that lets the user share it on Twitter. We also installed a plugin for the first time, and chances are pretty good that you'll need at least the ChildBrowser plugin in nearly every project you do. Thankfully it's also an easy plugin to install!

The index.html and index_android.html files are what kicks everything off by loading the necessary scripts and calling app.js.

First, index.html, which is intended for iOS is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Socializer</title>
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, maximum-scale=1.0" />
    <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./framework/base.css" type="text/css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./style/style.css" type="text/css" />
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./cordova/cordova-2.2.0-ios.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./plugins/iOS/ChildBrowser.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./framework/scroller.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./framework/utility.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./app.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="container" id="rootContainer">
    </div>
    <div id="preventClicks"></div>
  </body>
</html>

Next, index_android.html, which is for Android is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Socializer</title>
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, maximum-scale=1.0, target-densityDpi=160" />
    <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./framework/base.css" type="text/css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./style/style.css" type="text/css" />
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./cordova/cordova-2.2.0-android.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./plugins/Android/childbrowser.js"></script>    
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./framework/scroller.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./framework/utility.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="./app.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="container" id="rootContainer">
    </div>
    <div id="preventClicks"></div>
  </body>
</html>

The app.js file is what actually starts our app. It is also what initializes our localization, sets our current locale, loads various libraries (like ui-core.js), and finally, starts our app. Let's look at the code now:

var APP = APP || {};    

As usual, we set up our namespace – this time as APP. Next, we'll attach an event listener to the deviceready event. This event fires whenever Cordova has finished loading its libraries. We must wait for this event before we can do much of anything, especially anything that relies on Cordova. If we don't, we'll get errors.

document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);

function onDeviceReady()
{
  APP.start();
}

All the function in this code snippet does is call the APP.start() method, which is defined as follows:

APP.start = function ()
{
  PKUTIL.include ( [ "./framework/ui-core.js", 
                     "./framework/device.js", 
                     "./framework/localization.js" ], 
           function () { APP.initLocalization(); } );
}

You've already seen PKUTIL.include, so it isn't anything new to you, but here we're loading three libraries, and including a completion function to call APP.initLocalization. Because the include command is asynchronous, we cannot continue writing code after this call that relies on those libraries, or there's a good chance the library wouldn't be loaded in time. Therefore, we call the initLocalization function when all three libraries are fully loaded.

The next function, initLocalization, initializes all the localization libraries and when complete, we can load any locales we might need. When those locales are finished loading, we call the APP.init function and this is where the real work begins.

APP.initLocalization = function ()
{
  PKLOC.initializeGlobalization( 
   function ()
   {
      PKLOC.loadLocales ( ["en-US"], 
      function ()
     {
       APP.init();
     } );
   }
  );
}

The APP.init() function defines our app's basic translation matrix (you may see translations you've seen before - that's because they originated from here!), and we also proceed to load the three views we have created into the document using the following code snippet:

APP.init = function ()
{ 

Next, we have our basic translation matrix: application titles, start, back, and share, as seen in the following code block:

PKLOC.addTranslation("en", "APP_TITLE", "Socializer");
PKLOC.addTranslation("en", "START", "Start");
PKLOC.addTranslation("en", "BACK", "Back");
PKLOC.addTranslation("en", "SHARE", "Share");

Next, we call a function in PKUI.CORE called initializeApplication. All this application does is attach a special event handler that tracks the orientation of the device. But by doing so, it also attaches the device, the form factor, and the orientation to the BODY element, which is what permits us to target various platforms with CSS.

PKUI.CORE.initializeApplication ( );

Next, we load a view – gameView in this case (order doesn't really matter here):

PKUTIL.loadHTML("./views/socialView.html", {
    id: "socialView",
    className: "container",
    attachTo: $ge("rootContainer"),
    aSync: true
  }, function(success) {
    if (success) {
      socialView.initializeView();
    }
  });

We call PKUTIL.loadHTML to accomplish this, and if you're thinking it would be a lot like PKUTIL.include, you'd be right. We'll look at the definition a little later, but it should suffice to say that, we're loading the content inside socialView.html, wrapping it with another div with an ID of socialView and a class of container, attaching it to the rootContainer, and indicating that it can be loaded asynchronously.

Once it finishes loading, we'll call the initializeView() method on it.

We load the tweet view in the same way as follows:

PKUTIL.loadHTML("./views/tweetView.html", {
    id: "tweetView",
    className: "container",
    attachTo: $ge("rootContainer"),
    aSync: true
  }, function(success) {
    if (success) {
      tweetView.initializeView();
    }
  });

We load the start view almost exactly the same way as all the others. I'll highlight the difference in the following code block:

  PKUTIL.loadHTML ( "./views/startView.html", 
                    { id : "startView", 
                      className: "container", 
                      attachTo: $ge("rootContainer"), 
                      aSync: true
                    },
                    function (success)
                    {
                      if (success)
                      {
                        startView.initializeView();
                        PKUI.CORE.showView (startView);
                      }
                    });

}

The only thing we do differently is to show the startView function after we initialize it. At this point the app is fully loaded and running, and is waiting for the user to tap the Start button.

Let's look at PKUTIL.loadHTML a little closer:

PKUTIL.loadHTML = function( theFileName, options, completion )
{
  var aSync = options["aSync"];

The first thing we do is pull out the aSync option – we need it to call PKUTIL.load. Again, the warning about WP7 and loading synchronously still applies; it is best to assume you'll always be using true unless you can rule WP7 out of your supported platforms.

  PKUTIL.load ( theFileName, aSync, function ( success, data )
  {
    if (success)
    {

At this point, we've successfully loaded the HTML file; now we have to figure out what to do with it.

      var theId = options["id"];
      var theClass = options["className"];
      var attachTo = options["attachTo"];

First, we extract out the other parameters we need: id, className, and attachTo.

      var theElement = document.createElement ("DIV");
      theElement.setAttribute ("id", theId);
      theElement.setAttribute ("class", theClass);
      theElement.style.display = "none";
      theElement.innerHTML = data;

Next we create a DIV element, and give it the id and class values. We also load the data into the element.

      if (attachTo)
      {
        attachTo.appendChild (theElement);
      }
      else
      {
        document.body.appendChild (theElement);
      }

If possible, we'll attach to the element specified in attachTo, but if it isn't defined, we'll attach to the BODY element. It is at this point that our element become, a real DOM element in the display hierarchy.

Unfortunately this isn't all! Remember that our HTML files have SCRIPT tags in them. For whatever reason, these scripts don't execute automatically when loaded in this fashion; we have to create SCRIPT tags for them again as shown in the following code block:

      var theScriptTags = theElement.getElementsByTagName 
          ("script");

First, we get all the SCRIPT tags in our newly created element. Then we'll iterate through each one, as follows:

      for (var i=0;i<theScriptTags.length;i++)
      {
        try 
        {
          // inspired by
          http://bytes.com/topic/javascript/answers/513633-innerhtml-script-tag
          var theScriptElement = 
              document.createElement("script");
          theScriptElement.type = "text/javascript";
          theScriptElement.charset = "utf-8";
          if (theScriptTags[i].src)
          {
            theScriptElement.src = theScriptTags[i].src;
          }
          else
          {
            theScriptElement.text = theScriptTags[i].text;
          }
          document.body.appendChild (theScriptElement);

If this code looks somewhat familiar, it's because it is. PKUTIL.include has a variant of it. The important distinction is that it was only concerned about the data of the script – here we have to worry about whether the script is defined as an external script. That's why we check to see if the SRC attribute is defined.

We have also surrounded this in a try-catch block, just in case the scripts have errors in them:

        }
        catch ( err )
        {
          console.log ( "When loading " + theFileName + 
                        ", error: " + err );
        }
      }

When we've finished loading the HTML and the scripts, call the completion function:

      if (completion)
      {
        completion (PKUTIL.COMPLETION_SUCCESS);
      }
    }

If, for whatever reason, we couldn't load the view, we generate a log message and call the completion function with a failure notification as follows:

    else
    {
      console.log ("WARNING: Failed to load " + theFileName );
      if (completion)
      {
        completion (PKUTIL.COMPLETION_FAILURE);
      }
    }
  }
  );
}

As a project, Socializer does what it set out to do, but there's actually so much more that you could do to it to make it truly useful. Why don't you try one or more of the following challenges:

There are some resources that you might find interesting. You might want to look through the YASMF documentation to learn more about the framework we're using. Some of these resources are mentioned as follows: