Ice Cream Sandwiches really are the perfect dessert. You have ice cream smack dab in the middle of two chocolate cakes. Even better are the ice cream sandwiches that use chocolate chip cookies. Those are crazy delicious! What more can you ask for? Personally, I think a dash of Zenoss is certainly in order.
Sadly, that’s not what this this blog is about. The typical Ice Cream Sandwich is great but another Ice Cream Sandwich or ICS is was the codename for one of the latest Google Android mobile operating systems (Newest release Jelly Bean). I haven’t always been a fan of Google, but when they released the Android OS to the public, I started to lighten up on them. I’m sure you already know that it has a very substantial deployment and is very friendly to developers and the open source community, which is why I’m writing this blog.
Since I purchased my G1 Android phone, it was always my intention to develop a killer mobile app. That was several years ago and still no killer app, actually not even a little app. I’ve done the “hello world” apps here and there but never moved farther than that. I did, however, motivate my son to learn Android development which resulted in several of his apps being released to Google Play. Though I feel good about getting my son involved in this great software development world it’s time I do something with Android.
Here’s the plan. Over the coming weeks, my goal will be to develop an Android app for ICS that will run on my ASUS Transformer tablet. The application will pull events from a configured Zenoss server and simply display them. As the project proceeds, so will the scope (just to keep it as real as possible 🙂 ).
So the task list is as follows:
1. Decide on a project name.
** DONE - ZenDojo
2. Create a GitHub repo.
** DONE - GitHub Rep Here
3. Build a basic page layout.
4. Setup a test Zenoss instance.
5. Poll for events from test server.
6. Parse data into usable model for app.
7. Display data in a grid panel.
8. Provide alert functionality via the notification system.
To start the project off, I’ve decided on the project name of ZenDojo as this will be a training application. The focus of this effort is to give little snippets on how-tos in case you want to venture into Android application development for Zenoss.
If you’re new to GitHub, please check out the videos on the Zenoss community site from Nick Yeates (http://community.zenoss.org/docs/DOC-12932). These are great videos to get you going not only on GitHub but also ZenPack development.
Once this new application is created, I will work on getting it up to Google Play for download. Alright, off to get started. Please, feel free to provide feedback below to drive the direction of this project.
