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How Trigger.io Forge works and why we’re proud of it

trigger.io

45 pointsjamesbrady15 comments

In some respects this is similar to what Appcelerator Titanium does with Titanium Studio. I don't know how the CI stuff compares though, and I really like that Trigger focuses on command line tools rather than IDE extensions. I'm excited to try it out.

The post was a little confusing though: do you only have to build the native parts once, and then you can update your HTML/Javscript/CSS any time you like and the app will automatically update?

Some changes you make to your app configuration can affect what we need to do in the native code, so when that happens we have to go and do a rebuild on our servers.

When you're hacking away on your own code - JavaScript, HTML and CSS - no re-compilation is required and you can have a new app up and running on your device in a matter of seconds.

We think speeding up that development cycle is one of the keys things we need to deliver on to keep our customers happy.

How do you make it easy for me to update the app once it's live (or do I still have to do that by hand)? Do I have to submit a new app to the stores every time I want to push an update?

Currently, you'd still have to upload new versions to the store manually.

We're working on tools to ease that process also, but wanted to stay focused on the simplicity of the initial build process for our initial launch.

This is looking really interesting. I'm a web developer and dabbled with Phonegap/Appcelerator before - would happily trade complexity for simple command line tools and speed. Being able to output browser plugins from the same code is a nice extra too.

Ditto here. However, I'd be interested to know whether this follows the PhoneGap approach with iOS of essentially using webkit to dump your content into, or the Titanium approach of actually generating Objective-C...

Architecturally, we're more similar to PhoneGap than Appcelerator: we do use the native WebView as a container for the app.

There's a million things to talk about and this margin is too narrow: I might do a deeper dive in a follow-up post...

10-4, thanks for the response. Congrats, and best of luck.

Thanks! Yep, we see good command-line tools as being the best substrate to build on: even if we did support every platform, people are going to want to run scheduled builds and so on.

We actually find ourselves developing as Chrome extensions for the first few iterations, purely because the debugging tools there are great. After that, it's an easy switch into a mobile app, using our Catalyst debugging tool.

Just out of curiosity, what is it that you think is complex using phonegap build? I've used it before and I thought it was very simple. I was even able to walk our receptionist over the phone on how to generate new build for android from our ios build using phonegap build. Thanks. I am also interested in using command line tools though. Thanks.

I'm really looking forward to developing some apps with this. I'm really familiar with HTML, JS and CSS. This makes it so much easier for me to build Android and iOS apps together, hopefully this really speeds up my Mobile app development time with little to no performance problems as a result.

Somewhat ironically :) this link doesn't load in Internet Explorer [1]: "Internet Explorer cannot display the page"

1. At work

What version of IE? Looks OK for me on IE9 (and IE7/8 mode)...

Can you get to our main site https://trigger.io/ ?

I'm getting a connection refused in Firefox 9

It's IE8. Get the same with your front page: "IE cannot display the page"

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