Having published a first Android application Audio Clock in the Android Market my attention has turned to developing something new. Audio Clock was simple but this new application is on a whole other scale.
Audio Clock had a minimal UI – in fact just some configuration views and a notification bar entry – and ran in the background, waking every 15 minutes to chime. It has no web component, no remote connections. In other words it was kept almost as simple as it was possible to be whilst till providing some useful purpose.
The current application, which I should be able to start testing in the wild with some willing victims within a week is completely different. It will have a relatively complex UI. It will use more hardware features. It will require an internet connection and I will have to write a server component.
Having spent the last four months working on Groovy and Grails applications it was only natural that I should write the server using the same technology. After all, Groovy and Grails now is everything Java and the JEE web tier should have been a couple of years ago.
Where to host it though? I’d been considering Google App Engine – it has good Android integration including push notifications, but my attempts to get something going were patchy and then Google’s new price list came through. I considered self-hosting to start with, but my Virgin ADSL connection is fast when it works, but is too intermittent to be trusted.
Around that time a colleague at work introduced me to Heroku.com, a cloud application platform that started out supporting Ruby but has recently started supporting JVM based languages as well. Some further leg work then led me to this post from Tomás Lin which took me from zero to a deployed Grails application in under 30 minutes using Maven and Git. Fantastic!
So now I’m powering ahead with an embryonic server that can talk to my fast-developing Android application. With luck and a following wind I’ll have end-to-end communications implemented in a couple more evenings work.
By the way – Audio Clock is ticking along nicely (if you’ll excuse the pun) at one sale a day. No marketing, no seed purchases or reviews. Just consistent sales and a list of enhancements I’ll be adding over time.