Beginners’ guide to Mobile App development with Nokia WRT – Selecting the IDE
Selecting the development environment (IDE)
As we discussed before in part 1 of this tutorial, WRT is basically a browser app without the browser, therefore, we should be able to use our preferred web development tools to develop our widget.
Luckily, quite a few development environments already implemented plug-ins to simplify the development of the widgets.
Nokia WRT Plug-in 2.0 for Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services that help you and your team do more.
I actually was using Aptana for my day-to-day php development so for me it was a nice to learn that I can still use Aptana also for WRT development.
Aptana supports all the latest Nokia Javascript Service APIs for accessing device contacts, geo-location, accelerometers, cameras, and other device capabilities.
It supports also development of home-screen widgets (which we will address later in this series) which are small, live views of Nokia WRT widgets. The home screen widget can be developed by coding it inline with the main widget that it will link to, then preview the home screen widget by exiting the main widget preview.
Best of all, Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse hence, the standard version is free. You can download Aptana either as standalone app or as a plugin for Eclipse in the Aptana Studio download page.
Since I’m using Aptana, my examples and screen shots will be based on Aptana Studio with the WRT plug-in.
Nokia WRT Extension for Adobe Dreamweaver
The popular Adobe Dreamweaver has also a plugin which simplifies the development of WRT widgets which can be downloaded from Adobe’s extension exchange page.
Not sure if this is a mistake but according to Adobe’s pages they support only Web Runtime 1.0 API and not 1.1…In any event, if you are using Dreamweaver as web development environment you should check this out.
Nokia WRT Plug-in for Visual Studio
Web developers who have chosen Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 as their development platform, can now plug-in features that dramatically simplify the process of creating WRT widgets. The Nokia WRT Plug-in adds tools to create or import, edit, preview, debug, validate, package, and deploy WRT widgets. To simplify coding Web Runtime 1.0 API is supported in Visual Studio’s code completion feature.
You can download the plugin here.
Next, Designing the widget.
- Introduction
- Selecting the IDE
- Designing the widget
- Our first Basic Nokia WRT Widget
- Deploying our Widget
