Introduction about Calabash Android

Calabash is an automated UI acceptance testing framework that allows us to write and execute test cases to validate the functionality of the mobile applicatioAndroid and iOS mobile apps. 

Setting-up the Calabsh Android in Windows 
To setup the calabash in your machine you should have ruby installed. 
 You can find the ruby installer from this link :
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/installation/#rubyinstaller

 1. Open the command prompt and type 
                gem install-android calabash
 2.   To make sure that you have installed android-calabash, check its version
 3.   After the installation you can create the basic skeleton 

Here you can see *.feature file 
That contains scenarios that we are going to automate. 
Methods used by the feature file is written in *.rd file inside the "step definition" folder

Test Automation tools

There are several mobile automation tools available in the world. Among them lets have a small over view of three these tools.

Monkey Talk

Monkey talk is a simple mobile automation tool for both iOS and android Apps. It basically has two tools : Monkey talk IDE and Monkey talk agent. The IDE is used for Record and play the test suites on emulators or real device.  Monkey talk agent is a library that linked to the application that is going to be test. 

Further more details about monkey talk you can find it on Monkey talk documentation:

https://www.cloudmonkeymobile.com/monkeytalk

Comparing with the other tools Monkey talk provide a simple IDE to the user. That is more user friendly. But If you take an android application you have to convert the application as the AspectJ Project. That is little bit hazel the user. There are some limitation in this tool as well.

Calabash
Calabash also a automation testing tool for mobile and hybrid applications.

An Introduction about Phonegap

What is phonegap ? 
PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework. It enables all mobile developers to build applications for mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
It is basically bridging the Gap between the Web and mobile devices.

Native Apps VS WebApps :
Native apps are written in a programming language for targeted operating system. 
    Eg: Apple iOs devices : iOs SDK using objective c
           Android Devices : Android SDK using Java

on the other hand WebApps are Web based applications written in traditional web programming languages. 
     Eg:  HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP

Native applications are able to communicate with the Mobile device hardware. 
Application built with phonegap is not just a normal web application. They can able to communicate with the mobile hardware, such as accelometer or GPS in ways that are unavailable in normal web applications. 

Phonegap applications are also built and packaged like native applications, that means they can distribute through Apple store or Android Market.

Why PhoneGap
Mobile development is a mess, building applications for each devices iPhone, Android mobiles, Windows Phone ect.  requires different frameworks and languages.
But PhoneGap does not need those things. 
Further more it is an open source implementation. It supports iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WebOs, Windowsphone, and Simbian

How PhoneGap works
Build your app once in web standards
Wrap it with the phoneGap - PhoneGap build you can get get the access to the native APIs
Deploy to multiple platforms


Advantages :
1. Use single code base for multiple platform applications 
2. You can leverage the hardware specific features such as Geolocation Accelorometer
3. Open source
4. Requires knowledge of common web technologies rather than multiple distinct platforms

What is a Compiler

A Compiler is a Computer Program that translates or compiles a program written in the high level programming language into the low level programming language.

It is used to cover the gab between the high level language and machine language.

Every high level language has its own syntax that's why the concept of compiler arose... By Compiler the syntax of one language is understood and converted machine understandable language.

The phases of a compiler 

We split the compilation into several phases with well defined interfaces.
The compiler consists of 3 main parts:

• Front end
• Lexical analysis
• Syntax analysis
• Type checking
• Intermediate end
• Intermediate code generation
• Back end
• Register allocation
• Machine code generation
• Assembly and linking

Each phase, through checking and transformation, establishes stronger in variants on the things it passes on to the next, so that writing each subsequent phase is easier than if these have to take all the preceding into account.