Open Locast Core is an Android library that works in conjunction with the Open Locast web platform. It is a framework for building location-based media apps, with the ability to synchronize data to/from the web platform.
Out of the box, Open Locast Core provides a data layer for data-driven apps. Using SimpleContentProvider, it provides an easy-to-use database layer which is exposed as a Content Provider. This library builds on top of SimpleContentProvider by adding an account system, a synchronization framework, some abstract classes that implement a bunch of boring-but-necessary things like login / registration activities, and a media processing layer.
This library is intended to directly compliment Open Locast Web Core, providing many similar data models and interfacing with the API it exposes.
Open Locast Core has come from numerous projects that we've worked on over the past few years, so it still has a bit of cruft from these projects in its corners. Our team is working hard to sweep out any remaining cruftbunnies and hopefully this notice can be removed soon.
As this is a fairly complex library, there is a complete example app which is published as a separate repository. The example app contains this library as a submodule, so you'll need to either get the example or the library as described below, but you shouldn't need to do both.
You can get the example code by doing the following:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mitmel/Locast-Core-Android-Example.git
This library includes a submodule, so you'll want to get that too. You can get both at the same time with the following command:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mitmel/Locast-Core-Android.git
Currently this project uses Android + Eclipse for building the project
(although Android + ant would probably work too). You'll need to load the
dependent module first as a separate project. In Eclipse, this is File -> New -> Other -> Android -> Android Project from Existing Code and then select the
SimpleContentProvider directory. Make sure that when you right-click on the
project → properties → Android → Library, "Is Library" is checked.
Once you have SimpleContentProvider loaded and building, you'll want to import this library using the same import technique. Once it's imported, make sure that SimpleContentProvider is loaded as a library by going to the same menu as mentioned above, but adding SimpleContentProvider to the list of libraries.
The other libraries in libs/ should be automatically loaded. If they aren't and Refresh doesn't pull them in, you may have an older version of the SDK. In which case, you should upgrade.
Generally, it's best to build against the latest Android library as the build target, especially as newer versions of the SDK will look for incompatible uses of API calls on older versions of Android.
The library communicates with the server using a public RESTful API, allowing both authenticated and unauthenticated API requests.
The API's base URL is stored in your application's manifest. You can add it in
by adding a block similar to this to your <application /> section of your
AndroidManifest.xml:
<meta-data
android:name="edu.mit.mobile.android.locast.base_url"
android:value="http://example.com/openlocast/api/" />
Open Locast Core is built off many components, including ones developed in our lab. As many as possible are included as jar files (with the specific commit of the included jar detailed in the changelog). The ones that cannot be included as jars can be linked in as Android libraries (which is known to be somewhat tedious to set up).
- MelAUtils (included)
- SimpleContentProvider (included, git sub-module)
- android-support-v4 (included)
- Apache HTTP MIME (included)
While any tool can be used to do translation, we have used android2po to convert to/from standard gettext .po files in conjunction with Pootle.
Locast Android Core
Copyright 2010-2012 MIT Mobile Experience Lab
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.