Building Tools with GitHub

Chapter 7. Android and the Git Data API

You might not use your phone right now as a developer tool, but the odds are that you will soon. At the moment, phones and tablets can be great for reading code, but the editors we developers use on our laptops have not yet been reimagined for mobile devices. We are getting close though: the GitHub API is accessible through the well-written EGit client library for Java, and this library supports both reading data stored on GitHub and writing data back into it. These are a perfect set of building blocks to develop applications for the Android platform, currently the world’s most popular mobile OS.

In this chapter, we’ll use the Java EGit libraries to develop a small Android application that posts to our blog hosted on GitHub. Our blogging application will allow us to log in to GitHub, and then ask us for a quick note describing how we are feeling. The application will then compose a Jekyll blog post for us and push the post into our blog on GitHub.

Setting Up

To build this application, we need to create a Jekyll blog and then install the necessary Android build tools.

Creating a Jekyll Blog

We are writing an application that adds Jekyll blog entries, and we are writing tests to verify our application works as advertisted, so we need a sandbox blog against which we can run commands. There are various ways to create a new Jekyll blog. The simplest is to run a series of Ruby commands documented here; if you want to know more about Jekyll, ...