I recently updated the PhoneGap plugin for Twilio Client (a VoIP SDK for iOS and Android) to support Cocoapods. This means that you can use this plugin with automated builds now!
cordova plugin add twilio-client-phonegap-plugin
Version 1.1.0 is published to npm (https://www.npmjs.com/package/twilio-client-phonegap-plugin)
See the GitHub repo for more:
https://github.com/jefflinwood/twilio_client_phonegap
Recently, Cordova added the ability to require Android libraries as Gradle dependencies. This helps with projects that can share dependencies, as well as saving a manual installation step. Because of some user-reported conflicts with other Cordova plugins, I updated the Twilio PhoneGap plugin to support Gradle installation of the Android support v4 library.
https://github.com/jefflinwood/twilio_client_phonegap
Check out the latest here – I also need to do another compatibility round of testing with the latest Cordova and Twilio libraries.
For those of you using the Twilio PhoneGap/Cordova Plugin https://github.com/jefflinwood/twilio_client_phonegap, I have just updated with Marco Padillo‘s pull request to fix a deprecated Cordova iOS method that was preventing compiling with the 4.1.0 version of the Cordova iOS plugin.
I’ve tested out the plugin with the latest Twilio Client libraries, and everything is great except on the Android side with Marshmallow – the latest Twilio Android Client SDK supports the new runtime permissions, so I’ll need to integrate that and test with my Nexus 7 for Marshmallow support. In the meantime, just target API 22 on the Android side.
My Talk at Twilio’s Signal 2015 Conference, Using your web development skills to build Twilio-powered apps for Android and iOS, is now up as a video. If you’re interested in adding voice to your mobile apps using the Twilio Client Plugin for PhoneGap, this video is a short intro to the topic. If you have any questions about mobile app development with Twilio, I’d be happy to talk about it!
I’ll be speaking at Twilio’s Signal Conference later today about the Twilio Client Plugin for PhoneGap. Here’s a quick getting started guide (as a PDF) for running the Twilio Client inside of a PhoneGap mobile App.
I just updated the Twilio Client for PhoneGap plugin: https://github.com/jefflinwood/twilio_client_phonegap to support the latest version of Twilio’s client SDKs for both iOS and Android.
For those of you who wonder why you might need these, the native browsers for iOS and Android don’t support the technology used in the Twilio Client SDK for JavaScript, so if you want to build voice-enabled mobile applications, you will need to create native applications. You could develop these in Objective-C or Swift for iOS, or in Java for Android, or go with a cross-platform solution like Xamarin or Cordova/PhoneGap.
Cordova/PhoneGap lets you use HTML5/CSS/Javascript to build your mobile applications, and while it’s not the right choice for every application, it’s certainly one solution. The Twilio Plugin for PhoneGap lets you use the native Twilio Client SDK’s from JavaScript, with a syntax that is very close to the Twilio Client for JavaScript syntax.
At AirConf 2014, I gave this talk on Twilio for developers who haven’t used it before, or who haven’t used it much. I also set up a few live demos for people to try, so that was fun!
I’ve been one of the Twilio (an API for Voice and SMS) experts at AirPair for a while. AirPair is a great little service that matches up software developers with experts in the field – trying to implement in-app purchase on iOS ? There’s probably an expert on that. Want to migrate from MySQL to MongoDB for your Django application? Find that expert on AirPair. The idea is that you can hire those experts on an hourly basis for a video interview where they help you out.
Because I like working with Twilio, and I’ve done a lot of work advising developers on how to use Twilio in various projects, I agreed to give a talk during AirPair’s first conference – AirConf – on August 6th, at 12 pm Central Daylight Time/5pm Greenwich Mean Time. Why is the time so important? It’s a virtual conference, conducted over Google Hangouts. So you don’t have to be in the same physical location as I am for the conference – no travel necessary!
I’m covering Twilio for beginners, so if you’re not familiar with Twilio, this is a great talk to attend. If you’ve already used Twilio in a few applications, it’s probably going to be a lot of things you already know, like how to send or receive an SMS. I’m going to try and be as language neutral as possible in my talk – I’ve used the Twilio API from Java, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, and Javascript, and it all basically works the same, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I’m still looking to have an excuse to use Twilio from C# or Python!
I recently got the chance to help out another developer (BetterVoicemail.com) by developing an open source PhoneGap/Cordova plugin for the Twilio Client SDK. If you’re not familiar with Twilio Client, it’s a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) library for web, iOS, and Android that lets you build web pages and mobile apps that can make outgoing phone calls, receive phone calls, chat through the browser, and all kinds of other interesting projects.
One of the interesting things about its implementation is that the JavaScript web Twilio Client SDK does not currently work on either Android or iOS web browsers. This means that to have voice-enabled mobile applications, you need to use the iOS or Android SDK’s. Those are written for developers using the native languages of the platform – either Objective-C, or Android – so it’s not really very easy to have a cross-platform solution.
One way to bridge this gap is to use PhoneGap to build your applications in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript – Steve Graham had built a PhoneGap Plugin for the Twilio Client for iOS at https://github.com/stevegraham/twilio_client_phonegap that shared the same Javascript API as the Twilio web client. There wasn’t an Android implementation, so it wasn’t truly cross-platform.
The first thing I did was to bring the current iOS code base up to PhoneGap 2.9 compatibility – PhoneGap moves quickly and breaks existing plugins, though they do publish a plugin upgrade guide to follow. After using that as a base, I built a test iOS PhoneGap app that exercised the iOS plugin, because the idea was that the Android plugin would work identically to the iOS plugin.
The Twilio Android Client SDK doesn’t have the same API as the iOS version – in particular, to handle incoming calls, you need to construct a PendingIntent for the Twilio Client SDK to fire off, instead of just registering a delegate with the SDK. So for the Android plugin to work, you need to add an activity to your Android manifest XML file. I used the LocalBroadcastManager to communicate with the plugin, so I could implement a listener that worked exactly like the iOS version. You’ll also need to follow the Twilio Client for Android installation instructions (after using PhoneGap/Cordova to generate your project), which are more complicated than the Twilio Client for iOS installation instructions.
If you want to use the Twilio Client plugin for PhoneGap for Android or iOS, it hasn’t yet been merged back into the original repo yet – so clone it from my GitHub for the time being: (https://github.com/jefflinwood/twilio_client_phonegap)