Google has recently announced AppInventor which is a web based visual IDE for Android. I've already submitted a request for an account. I've been a bit slow in figuring out the visual design aspects of Android so I am looking forward to using this as a tool to design my layouts. My one question is: will it have a way to edit raw code?
Read more about it here.
I have been posting a lot of tech tips lately. As I've mentioned before, this is often for my own benefit so I can go back and review what I did when I have the same issue a year down the road.
Today's tip is for handling single quotes in PL/SQL. I'm working with Postgres 8, this may also apply to Oracle. I have a function that is taking a string value which was failing if that value had a single quote in it. I tried using the quote_ident, and quote_literal functions provided by PL/SQL but they didn't work as I would have expected, adding additional quotes to the ends of the value so I had to fall back to a string replace function:
REPLACE(column, '''', '''''')
This replaces all singe quotes within the string with two single quotes as needed.
I'm finally getting somewhere on my Android app. It helps that I'm getting my head wrapped around the platform. The main problem I was having as of late, was that my custom list adapter was messing with the onListItemClick listener. So I opted to go back to the simple list provided by Android and it's working much better.
Here's a small overview of my app in case you don't know what I'm talking about. One of my roles at work is keeping tabs on several servers. I get automatic notifications via email if there are issues, but I wanted to be able to initiate a check. So far it simply makes sure the domain is reachable and then gets the HTTP response code of a specific URL.
Future planned features are
Development isn't very rapid as we're in the middle of getting a house built and selling our home. Plus having 2 kids slows things down as well. But the project seems to be keeping my interest. I recently read that the first Android car is rolling off the assembly line. How cool would that be to work on? The possibilities that would arise from hooking into the car's control modules are endless.
Steven Reimer
