Kotlin has many nice things going for it – be it null safety, data classes, extension functions, immutable collections or many other things. For me one additional thing is very interesting: The ability to create domain specific languages (DSLs) easily. Easily, because creating a DSL with Kotlin means that you simply choose to combine several […]  Continue Reading  “Creating Kotlin DSLs”

In today’s post I’m going to show how to develop a simple app for the Google Assistant. For developing this app, I will be using the Actions SDK. My next post will use Dialogflow (formerly api.ai) instead. After reading both posts you hopefully will know enough to decide which approach is better suited for you. […]  Continue Reading  “Using the Actions SDK to Develop for the Google Assistant”

Since I am going to use Cloud Functions For Firebase a bit more in coming posts on this blog, I am going to give a very brief overview of how you can use and test them. What are Cloud Functions for Firebase Cloud Functions is a node.js based offering where you can expose stateless services. […]  Continue Reading  “A Primer on Cloud Functions for Firebase”

At this year’s Google I/O, Google released a preview to the upcoming Android version. The so called L Developer Preview. This is a very big improvement over previous releases and I really love that Google is doing this. I think we all benefit by this decision. As developers and as consumers alike! Part of this […]  Continue Reading  “A First Glance at Android’s RecyclerView”

In this post I am going to write about the server-side of upstream messages with Google Cloud Messaging. This is the second part of my three-part series on this topic. If you haven’t read the first part about the flow of events and the Android implementation of upstream messaging, please read that one first. The […]  Continue Reading  “An XMPP Server for Google Cloud Messaging”

Google announced a new messaging model with Google Cloud Messaging on last years Google IO. This model allows for upstream messaging and for user specific notifications. This post is the first in a three-part series in which I am going to look into both these changes and to show you how to use them. I […]  Continue Reading  “Upstream Messages With Google Cloud Messaging”

In July 2013 Google announced ActionBarCompat as part of its support library package. This library makes it easy to use the Action Bar that have to support older devices. Many have waited for this to happen ever since the Action Bar was introduced with Honeycomb. I, though, didn’t expect that to happen. After all the […]  Continue Reading  “Migrating from ActionBarSherlock to ActionBarCompat”

SQLite is at the heart of Android’s database support. This database was developed with embedded environments in mind – and is used not only by Android but also by Apple’s iOS and Blackberry’s system as well as lots of other systems with low memory footprint and comparatively little CPU horsepower. Why SQLite in the first […]  Continue Reading  “SQLite in Android”

As you have seen in the previous tutorials about ActionBarSherlock and the ActionBar, you can add action items easily and they show up either in the ActionBar itself or in the overflow menu. But so far all you could add were normal action items. And those consisted either of icons, of text or of a […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionViews to Your ActionBar”

This tutorial shows you how to add action items to the ActionBar from within your Fragments and how to disable or enable action items depending on the state of your fragment. All code works with the stock Android ActionBar object as well as with ActionBarSherlock. Why do you want to add action items? In a […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionBar Items From Within Your Fragments”