TweetHours Extended App Preview and Build Demo
In the previous video I gave a very quick tour of what the TweetHours app does, and gave a quick look at how it works from a front end point of view.
The feedback from that video was interesting. Some people thought the app / course was ready to roll and fully complete. Alas, that is unfortunately not the case. That video was intended as a quick peak / sneak preview of what's to come - so sincere apologies if you feel misled.
In this video I cover the application architecture at a very high level, show how the app is currently getting its data (hint: it's not what you might expect, but there is a reason), and also cover the build process.
As mentioned in the video, TweetHours was originally conceived - and largely implemented - in June-July 2014. I then sat on the 90% finished app for no reason for another 12 months. Which, in hindsight, is quite silly. But here we are now.
As I write this there are still some outstanding bugs. This is partly because - as mentioned - the original code was sat on versions of Angular, Ionic, etc etc, that were a whole year out of date. If you've ever had a PHP project that you were working on, then left for a while, then came back too, well... running composer update can be a touch nerve wracking.
Of course, there really is no reason to update for updatings sake. But with development still underway it would be silly not to update now. So I did, and ultimately that led to a number of my JavaScript / Karma tests to blow up spectacularly. That's where I am currently up to - fixing those.
But that said, the app itself is buildable. As demonstrated in the video, the app will complete a build and it runs fine on the web browser (ionic serve), the iOS simulator, and my Android phone. It won't seem to run on the Android simulator though, which is a bit daft.
The video also touches briefly on the use of Commangular which I implemented in a bid to keep the code as modular as possible. This does add some complication to proceedings however, so I will cover this in much more detail in a forthcoming video. If you're interested in something similar but for Symfony, check out the awesome Tactician and associate bundle by Ross Tuck. I'm using that in another project (another API as it happens) and it's awesome.
I also mention a blog post where I cover a couple of bugs / issues I hit on yesterday with Ionic. If you're interested, that post is here.
