Sometime ago, I had written about Offline Avenues and making your SCORM Offline. That’s pretty powerful in itself. The benefits that are reaped from these offline technologies cannot be overstated.
There was a little challenge though.
It was mobile technology that enabled us to work offline, with virtually any form of content. It was the same technology that allowed us to have content running, in a portable manner with a great user experience. It was mobile technology that took time to get up and running. And that, was the challenge.
In the making-applications-offline-venture, I began seeing all the processes speed up progressively. Every gear and cog started moving faster, and apps started becoming offline quicker, almost every day. But the speed wave left a particular section of the process hanging back. This section went on to pose as the bottleneck.
This section of the entire process, was the part of creating the actual mobile application build. It was not just the part of creating the app. The entire process of
And a bunch of other stuff that involves manual and delicate work, like editing a configuration file or updating the app icon etc.
I have put up that little list up there to try and convince you that this ‘builder manual job’ is actually delicate and cumbersome at the same time. It evokes groans and grumbles from the dev team, and then they use rock-paper-scissors to find the sacrificial lamb for that episode of drudgery.
One day, a chunk of smart guys from the team took it upon themselves to slowly but surely, automate each step in the entire process, one by one. Inch by inch, we saw the coming up of our little Autobuilder. The smart ones needed hands-on expertise on multiple technologies spread over different stacks. One issue anywhere, like a little comma in a JSON, would bring the whole thing down. And it’s not like it is easy to test this anyway.
Well, thanks to some oceans of motivation, this smart bunch was able to comprehensively complete all the steps, automating each of them. The result now is a JAR file. Running that innocuous file, it does all the cumbersome work stated above and keeps it together quite robustly.
The next step in our little adventure is to make the Autobuilder available via an API endpoint. Now how cool would be that? I am sure we can score some brownie points with other teams here as well, who could use the Autobuilder for any and all hybrid mobile development projects.
And thus I conclude another anecdote about things we keep building – our own way of making the lives of our people, a bit better.
If you are interested in reading my other blogs about offline avenues and SCORM Offline Player, click here.