On April 3rd, we held our monthly office hours session on Sugar mobile SDK development (session 1 of 2).
Our guest expert was Andrew Zhukovsky, long time Sugar engineer and now Mobile Software Engineer here at SugarCRM, he has dedicated some of his time to build a pretty cool customization to demystify Sugar's mobile SDK, for that I thank you Andrew! You rock!
Session Highlights
We started with an overview of the Mobile architecture and knowledge needed to start coding for Sugar mobile. We explained how the Mobile SDK is a hybrid application where most programming happens using web technology. The SDK uses Apache Cordova to compile to native code for both iPhone and Android - allowing for a single codebase that supports multiple platforms.
What knowledge do we need to code for SugarCRM Mobile?
Andrew has explained the tools we use to code for mobile, which mostly Javascript using Mobile SDK and Rafa has further explained that the knowledge acquired along the years being a Sugar developer can still be used as our framework still uses Sidecar, Backbone along other Sugar Core app also uses, there's no need to learn other languages such as Object-C, Swift, Java, or Kotlin to build your app, that's super cool!
How about source code? Yes, the Mobile SDK contains all the core source code so you can explore and learn.
Pre-requisites to using the Mobile SDK
Andrew explained the pre-requisites necessary to start and create your first project using Mobile SDK.
In our Support page you'll find the basic instructions, however, Andrew has pointed out that you can also use the pre-requisites that comes with the SDK when you download, it might have other specific instructions for that particular version of the SDK.
Installing Sugar Mobile SDK and creating your first project
Andrew has shown us the details on how to not only download and install the SDK but also the best practices to unpack them and create your own folder structure for easier development.
The install process was also part of the demo where required libraries are downloaded through yarn's package manager to ensure compatibility to that particular SDK version.
Once all was installed we created our very own first project and Andrew showed/explained us the entire folder structure.
Your first customization
Andrew has built a address auto-complete functionality to demonstrate how easy it was to build and test.
The customization was an extension to the core address field, where Andrew has shown us all the code that he's done to modify that behavior.
That code has been released open-source in our Sugar Developer Office Hours github project.
Session Recording
This session was recorded on April 3rd. Here is the recording and slides.
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The next session will be on May 1st, 2024.
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Developer Office Hours are (typically) held on the first Wednesday of every month at 10 a.m. ET / 7 a.m. PT.