B4A adds Object Oriented support

Last year I began dabbling in Android programming.  Just for fun and only as time permitted so....not a lot.  I did manage to find time enough to run across Basic4Android (B4A), a visual IDE and language similar to VB.Net.  Though not overly advanced, B4A was inexpensive to get into and much easier to set up and churn out a first app than Android Java + Eclipse.
 
This week B4A took a big step forward by adding support for classes and, therefore, objects -- the fundamental requirement for object oriented programming (OOP).  Suddenly B4A is looking a lot more attractive for serious app development...

JSON bigger than XML??? #MarkupGeek

Continuing to chip away at my little Android programming projects, this week I put together some code to consume data from a JSON-formatted web feed.  JSON is more streamlined than XML and also happens to avoid certain cross-domain security roadblocks.  This means JSON is often a great choice for encapsulating objects and data that are destined for transport via web services over cell phone data plans.  It was a surprise, therefore, when I unexpectedly ran across an example of XML that was less verbose (smaller!) than its JSON equivalent...

Android programming with Basic4Android

Moving along from my initial foray into creating Android apps with Google's nifty but somewhat impractical AppInventor, I sought out other free (or nearly free) products that boasted a visual designer. Enter "Basic4Android", an IDE built using LUA to abstract the underlying Android JAVA classes and present a language very similar to Visual Basic...