Check out the first demo vid of Su-Preme MPA – my first Android app to be released on the market in few days!
MPA is a sample based music production app that mimics the look and feel of a classic analog device that is widely popular among urban music producers.
I’m proud to say that MPA is not a toy. We really mean it to be used by actual music producers to make actual beats.
The app was co-designed and will be promoted by Alaric “Supreme” Wilder of Wu-Tang Clan fame. He also did the video!
Why scan the classpath? There are various patterns that are often used in enterprise Java applications that require scanning of classpath and getting the list of all classes that are present in the application.
For example, if you want to discover all classes with a certain annotation (such as @Component in Spring Framework) to process them in a special way, you need a way to go over all classes in your application and select some of them based on which annotations they have.
However, neither Java SE nor Android have built-in facilities to safely get the list of all classes in your application in runtime. The reason for that is the theory behind classloaders in Java – the ability to go over all classes is neither needed in classic OOP nor feasible for all theoretically possible classloader implementations. However, in practice, scanning classpath and discovering the classes you need is quite possible in most cases, both in your web app and on Android. This is always going to be more or less a hack, but if it has been useful in web applications, it can also be useful in Android apps – with some caution, of course.
Thus, in this article I will show and explain a piece of code that does exactly that – scans your classpath and gives you the ability to go over all classes in your app.
My definition or, rather, my perception of an enterprise mobile app is generally the following:
Enterprise apps might not seem to be the most interesting kind to work on. However, they are attractive for many studios because customers usually pay well for them. In addition, as a developer, you will find that they are often challenging to implement – at least with functional and internal quality that will satisfy both the customer and you.
In this article, I would like to cover a list of typical facilities that Android developers need when developing such kind of apps. The platform does not really have that much to offer (as we will see), and many developers build their own ad-hoc frameworks that they try to reuse as needs arise.
I will share some thoughts that I have about that, and will be happy to know your stories too.
