This last week I’ve been negotiating with a company to do some consultancy work creating an Android app using Rhomobile. Whilst I cannot go into detail at this moment about the app, the funding is dependent on some governmental funding scheme, and still awaiting clearence, I thought I’d better install Rhomobile and check it out – it looks great “on paper” as it is a multi-platform mobile phone app environment based on Ruby on Rails.

So I started installing the environment following the very good instructions on Rhomobile’s site, however after doing so, remembering to set JAVA_HOME manually (Ubuntu’s update-java-alternatives doesn’t – surprisingly!), I ran into trouble. I got:

platform/android/Rhodes/src/com/rhomobile/rhodes/RhodesService.java:461: cannot find symbol

symbol : method setForeground(boolean)
location: class com.rhomobile.rhodes.RhodesService
setForeground(true);
^
platform/android/Rhodes/src/com/rhomobile/rhodes/RhodesService.java:480: cannot find symbol
symbol : method setForeground(boolean)
location: class com.rhomobile.rhodes.RhodesService
setForeground(false);
^
Note: Some input files use or override a deprecated API.
Note: Recompile with -Xlint:deprecation for details.
2 errors

It turns out that Rhomobile uses the deprecated setForeground(boolean) method, which Google has removed in the newest Android SDK. Luckily I had an older version of the Android SDK on my desktop, and it turns out that it works perfectly on that version. I can only hope Rhomobile fix this soon. I really hate using old SDKs!