lein-robbie

Robbie nodded his head - a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped that served as a torso by means of a short, flexible stalk - and obediently faced the tree. A thin metal film descended over his glowing eyes, and from within his body came a steady, resonant ticking. "Don't peek now - and don't skip any numbers," warned Gloria, and scurried for cover.

With unvarying regularity seconds were ticked off, and at the hundredth, up went the eyelids and the glowing red of Robbie's eyes swept the prospect.

--From Robbie, by Isaac Asimov. Published by Fictioneers, Inc. in 1940

lein-robbie is a leiningen plugin for creating Android apps built using phonegap and clojurescript.

Pre-requisites

• Leiningen 2.0
• Install the android SDK:
  • On macosx with brew, try brew install android-sdk
  • Go to The Android SDK installation instructions for instruction on other platforms.

NOTE: You don't need to have installed or downloaded Apache phonegap to use lein-robbie, but you might want to grab it to look at examples or documentation.

Installation

Clone this repository, run lein install, and then, to your ~/.lein/profiles.clj, add a plugin entry for lein-robbie. Mine looks like this:

{:user {:plugins [[lein-swank "1.4.4"]
                  [lein-pprint "1.1.1"]
                  [lein-robbie "0.1.1-SNAPSHOT"]
                  [clj-stacktrace "0.2.4"]]}}

The next time you use leiningen, the lein-robbie plugin will be downloaded and ready to go.

Usage

Once you've got all the prerequisites installed, here's the basic workflow:

$ lein new robbie my-app
Copying ...
Generating ...

$ lein cljsbuild once
...

# create your AVD if neccesary
$ android create avd -n robbie_image -t android-13
...

# start the AVD
$ emulator -avd robbie_image &
...

$ ant debug install
...

# verify you can see 'my_app' in the apps screen in the emulator

# launch your app

# hack, hack, hack

$ lein cljsbuild once && ant debug install

# goto 'launch your app'

It's also possible to specify which version of Android you wish to target:

$ lein new robbie myapp target android-10

You can always change this later in the generated AndroidManifest.xml file in your project.

You can also tell robbie you'd like to include a javascript framework with the project. Currently only jQuery Mobile 1.0 and jQuery Mobile 1.1 RC1 are supported:

$ lein new robbie myapp target android-10 framework jquery-mobile-1.0

or

$ lein new robbie myapp target android-10 framework jquery-mobile-1.1

TODO

• I'd like to override lein install to compile cljs and do ant debug install. My understanding is that I can just make a new leiningen/install function and it will override the default one as long [as it's newer than the leiningen built-in install task][6].
• Maybe it would be better to use a hook? (as in, robert)
• Add some subtasks for other android stuff, like release compiles, catting/tailing the adb log, so I don't have to remember how to use the android tools to do this and so the cljsbuild happens whenever it needs to, instead of having a separate step.
• Add example apps
• Longer term: make an iOS and possibly other platform version if this.

License

Copyright © 2012 Chris Bilson

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.

The phonegap portions are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, as described in LICENSE.phonegap.