How I built my first mobile app

When I thought of building an app the first question was what platform to use php, java, node.js etc.. I wanted a mobile-first approach, and for mobile I picked the hybrid app approach, which is a web-app built using html/css/java script however can run as a native app.

And for backend I picked java ee as this the platform I am most comfortable with, I picked NetBeans as my ide, and the bundled Glassfish 3 container

So the steps for creating the app went something as below
Create database model and tables in mysql (mysql workbench is of great help)
used JPA to create entities (netbeans 'create entity wizard' automated the whole thing)
used REST - Jersey to create the rest services (netbeans 'create rest from entity wizard' automated the whole thing)

Creating and testing the backend was fun, I created a session bean to create my business methods using multiple JPA Entities and the calling the session bean methods from the REST service operations. Tested the rest services from a Chrome app called 'Advanced REST Client'

Then it was time for front end, netbeans helps create html5 projects with seeded Angular JS, I used that, this video helped to get a context of Angular JS, Once I built a basic UI and the Angular JS controller to call the rest services, It was time to test locally.

The first issue I got was
XMLHttpRequest cannot load Origin http://localhost:8383 is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin

This was a Big issue for me, lot of material is available on fixing CORS, however finally I got an excellent solution here , by just using this CORS filter, I didn’t had to change anything in backend all GET, POST started working fine.

Now was the time to deploy the app, I deployed my backend app on cloudbees, I really liked cloudbees run@cloud service, after installing the SDK, by just 2 commands my app was up and running

bees app:deploy -a avijeetd/myapp -t glassfish3 D:\NetBeansProjects\myapp\dist\myapp.war

bees app:bind -db myapp -a myapp -as myapp

cloudbees provide free DB (upto 5MB) and free deployment of one application.

For the mobile app, I used phonegap, phonegap build service, can convert the HTML/CSS/JS application to native applications, such as apk (android application package) file. I used github to host the source code, again free service for public repository.

So by using all these free could services, I was finally happy to see my app on an android phone. Now time to add more features to the app such as security (authentication), multi-user support in data base etc. then maybe I can tell you to download the app from the market place :-)