Codename One iOS Offline Build Project

To build upon my last post, I have encapsulated the steps to build an iOS application offline (i.e. without having to send to the CodenameOne build server) into a single ANT script that can easily be installed on your local system, and imported into the build.xml file of your CodenameOne application.

The CodenameOne folks have provided me with space in the CodnameOne incubator subversion repository to host this project so it will be available to everyone.

Synopsis

The Offline Build Tools project includes some scripts to perform the building of CodenameOne applications on any computer running Mac OS X 10.7 and Xcode 4+. The applications it produces should be equivalent to those apps produced by the build server in every way (including Native Interface support). Please let me know if you run into any cases that the build tools do not support).

Installation

Before you can use the offline build tools in your Netbeans project, you need to install the build tools project. You only need to do this once. Installation involves only two steps:

  1. Check out the offline-build-tools project from the SVN repository:
svn checkout https://codenameone-incubator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/shannah/offline-build-tools codenameone-build-tools
  1. Run the ant install script:
$ cd codenameone-build-tools
$ ant install

This will check out the entire CodenameOne SVN repository into the “tools” subdirectory so that it can be used for building your projects. It may take some time to complete as the SVN repository is quite large.

When the installation is complete, you should notice that it created a file named “build-ios.xml” inside the codenameone-build-tools/dist directory. This contains a ready-to-use ANT target that can be imported into the build.xml files of your CodenameOne applications.

Adding the “build-for-ios-device-locally” Target to Your Netbeans Project

Now that the Offline Build Tools have been installed, you can freely add the resulting ANT target to your CodenameOne application. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to create a CodenameOne project in Netbeans (e.g. File > New Project, and select “Codename One” as the project type).

Under the “Files” tab in Netbeans, you should be able to see and open the “build.xml” file for your project. Just add the following <import> statement anywhere inside the <project> tags of the build.xml file:

<import file="/path/to/codenameone-build-tools/dist/build-ios.xml"/>

Now, if you right click on the build.xml file, and select “Run Target” > “Other Targets”, you will see a target named “build-for-ios-device-locally”. Select this target to build your project.

Alternatively, you can build from the command line using:

ant build-for-ios-locally

Note: If building from the command line, you may need to set your JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to your JDK’s Home directory. e.g.

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0u10.jdk/Contents/Home

If you’re not using CodenameOne yet, for building mobile apps, you really need to start. It is the only solution that currently allows you to write apps for all major platforms in a performant way.

Disclaimer

This project is meant for development purposes. I created it to allow me to be able to test and develop patches for CodenameOne without having to submit them to the CodenameOne people to be applied to the server. The current settings work directly off of the CodenameOne trunk, which is probably not ideal for production apps … it is bleeding edge.

I recommend using the CodenameOne build server for all production builds as it has been refined with (probably) some optimizations, and it makes it much easier to build on many different platforms with great ease.

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