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44 Chapter 2 PhoneGap Development, Testing, and Debugging
no means a complete list of options; refer to the PhoneGap wiki (http://wiki
.phonegap.com) for information on additional tools that might be available.
Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator
When developing a PhoneGap application, it’s quite time-consuming to build the
application and load it into a simulator or emulator for testing. The Ripple Mobile
Environment Emulator (RMEE) is a freely available tool that helps alleviate this
problem by providing a desktop browser–based interface you can use to test your
PhoneGap applications. The RMEE emulates the execution of the PhoneGap APIs
within the browser container. You should use the emulator for quick testing of
PhoneGap application features during development and then switch to packaging/
building PhoneGap applications and testing them on actual devices or device emulators
or simulators for more thorough testing. The RMEE is not designed to
replace testing on real devices, device simulators, or device emulators.
RIM and the Ripple Emulator
Tiny Hippos, the company that produced of the Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator,
was recently purchased by RIM and is expected to become the default way to test
BlackBerry WebWorks applications. The emulator has supported PhoneGap for quite a
while and is expected to continue to support the project under RIM’s ownership.
The RMEE is implemented as an extension to the Google Chrome browser, so
before you can start using the emulator, you must first install the latest version of
Chrome from www.google.com/chrome. Once you have Chrome up and running,
launch the browser and navigate to http://ripple.tinyhippos.com. From the Tiny
Hippos home page, click the Get Ripple link, and follow the prompts to install the
latest version of the emulator.
Before you can start emulating PhoneGap within the RMEE, you must first configure
the browser to allow the emulator access to files on the local file system.
Open the Chrome browser, right-click the Ripple icon to the right of the browser’s
address bar, and select Manage extensions. The browser will display a page similar
to the one shown in Figure 2-13. Enable the “Allow access to file URLs” option
for the RMEE as shown in the figure and then close the page by clicking the X to
the right of the Extensions tab.