Web developer pitfalls

These thoughts for a long time lay in the drafts and were the result of "boiling" during the development of the application for Nokia. The first version of the article was written in the form of criticism, but since there are so many attacks on the company on Habré, I redid the article in a different way.

Please do not worry about haters of this brand, as it is rather an overview of current tools and features for web developers. The description of the negative sides in this case should be considered as an attempt to address directly on current problems. So, what I encountered while developing an application for Nokia.

Ovi store

I thought to register with the Ovi Store for quite some time, from the very moment when registration was opened to individual developers. The price was quite loyal - 50 euros one-time. Long thought, and it turned out right, because after a while they reduced the price to 1 euro (I would have told you in big colors if I paid 50 then). But here, too, it was not so simple. Payment stubbornly did not pass, but I tried to pay as many as 3 different cards - nothing happened. I called to the processing center in England, they said to call on a weekday. I wrote to the support of Nokia - registered directly by mail and for free.
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Some time ago on Habré, an advertising campaign of Nokia was conducted, where the Ovi App Wizard was promoted (http://appwizard.ovi.com/). This tool allows you to quickly create a simple news application if you have an RSS feed on the site. Recall the main purpose of RSS, namely - it was created to describe the news feeds. All this has already led to a situation where there are a bunch of useless applications in the Ovi Store. For example, the Vedomosti newspaper itself is quite informative, but its widget is simply a collection of headlines. Potentially such applications can be as many as RSS feeds on the Internet.

I will add that apparently, Nokia decided not just to introduce such a tool, they also actively promote it among large companies - at one point, the Ovi Store began to replenish with the generated App Wizard readers from WWF, Greanpeace, etc. Because of this, it becomes much more difficult to get into the tops. And this is despite the fact that the famous "fart" applications freely exist in the mobile store. Business is not limited to one large companies. Such ads are attracted and generally incomprehensible RSS-feeds. Like, for example, this one (http://store.ovi.com/content/37316).

Nokia WRT widgets

Since I am interested in developing web applications under Nokia, the choice immediately fell to creating widgets with which you can create html / js applications. Unfortunately, Nokia uses a rather old version of WebKit - 525. And to put it mildly, not quickly, it works. Therefore, to rely on buns, such as HTML5 is useless. Well, if jQuery works, you can’t even dream about jQuery Mobile (it’s actually not working in WRT). In addition, the js-code on the phone is installed in the open, which, in principle, not the worst problem, you can use obfuscators. More terrible problem, if the application logic is not limited to a simple http, then you have to sweat.

My task was to access the camera and microphone. It turned out that there immediately appeared a number of problems. To begin with, the logic is to turn to the Nokia Platform Services, which provides access to all sorts of goodies. However, the microphone is completely absent there, and the presence of the camera is only in version 2.0. Tracking version was not comme il faut, and the presence of a microphone is critical.

Further, it turns out that in the Nokia community this problem has already been encountered (as well as others), and as a result APIBridge was created for such cases. It is an executable file that creates a local server on the phone, waits for http requests and calls a camera, microphone, forwards files, and so on. Of course, all these are crutches, but the main problem is that the APIBridge is a sis file, and the widget is a wgz file (popularly just zip). Then the next crutch comes on the scene - the WGZ installer, by compiling which you can get a sis file containing both the widget and the same APIBridge. But the WGZ Installer must first be edited, and the sis file must be signed.

Package and signing

In order to use some important functions in the phone for the sis-file, you will need not just a Chinese certificate, but a real Nokia certificate. Obtaining a certificate for testing has recently become simpler and free of charge. To do this, you need to send an application by email to the Ovi Store, they will send a contract that you need to sign, scan and send along with IMEI phones for testing. After testing is completed, the application is poured into the store, where it is already signed with a real certificate for all phones.

Everything is clear and passed quickly. However, to compile applications, it makes sense to download the SK SDK and there was a problem with it. Ideally, it should write paths to the folders where executable files are stored in Windows, but for some reason, in practice, I was unlucky all the time, and when I finally stupidly compiled the sis file and signed it, two months had passed. The process for the unintelligible in programming for desktops is not at all obvious, but there is no big manual on web development with APIBridge. As it turned out, with Qt, signing is much easier.

Nokia Qt SDK

I'll start right away with the fact that the Qt WRT project was frozen not so long ago, although it is obvious that it would be more convenient for the web developer to work with it - it has a modern WebKit, Qt has access to phone devices, and in general Qt has great prospects in Nokia phones.

On access to devices, it is worth noting separately that for these purposes there is a separate Qt Mobility API. For a person who did not work with languages ​​like C ++, the behavior of this library is absolutely not obvious. The examples with the camera started far from the first time and it was ditched a lot of time just to understand that this is not what I need. For example, the ability to display the camera in the application itself still did not suit me, since my goal was to use a browser where the camera simply could not be displayed.

Using the instructions, you can compile QtWebKit plus a widget, but, again, for applications “a little more than just something to show” is too much, and functions are not enough. In addition, many bugs. For example, when accessing local resources, Qt asks for a request to connect to the Internet (which is obviously not needed here), and when choosing an access point, it naturally gives a message that there is no such resource (apparently at the router level).

Although I pay tribute to the fact that everything is developing very quickly in Qt (including the same Qt Mobility), Qt Creator is quite a handy tool that can work without devouring a lot of resources. In addition, it is convenient, having a mobile phone, to compile and upload everything at once for testing directly on the device (with which there is a constant hemorrhage when working with the Nokia WRT). But it’s still too early for a web developer to shoot cream there, and why Qt WRT has been frozen is incomprehensible and even offensive.

The current stage of the project

I really wanted the application to work under Qt, but when I tried to further compile APIBridge and the required Express installer (which downloads the Qt libraries if necessary), this led to a strange glitch - APIBridge was not installed. In any case, I still didn’t receive access to the local server (about which a bug-report was compiled). As a result, after a couple of months of torment, I still compiled the project using the usual SDK tools a single file containing the APIBridge and the widget itself, and signed it. Now we are engaged in design and, perhaps, soon I will tell what was all the fuss about.

Nokia's current stage

Now it is clear that after the appearance of the iPhone / Android requirements of developers and users, Symbian had to create new tools on top of the old ones. As a result, a lot of crutches appeared, which should disappear further, because it is impossible to work with them. But the work is clearly underway, and all the forces are thrown at Qt, because the web developer will have so far uneasy waiting for similar solutions based on this technology. But now the right steps have been taken, such as the price of registration in the Ovi Store and the free receipt of certificates.

For my part, I wish Nokia good luck in the mobile phone market, and I will continue to struggle with current development methods.