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Weekend project for a shell Android app to display U.S. Navy uniform regulations without comms

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purinchu/NavyUniformRegs

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This is the shell of an Android app that takes the Navy uniform regulations, as published at the Navy Personnel Command website, and integrates them with a very basic Android WebView.

Screenshot

LICENSE

I've chosen the BSD license for my work. Some of the files are auto-generated by the Android Studio toolchain, and to the extent that license applies to these at all, BSD for those too. See the COPYING file.

Although I do not embed them in this source distribution, the U.S. Navy uniform regulations themselves are not under copyright and are cleared for public release.

Dependencies

To run

  • Android 4.0 (API level 16 or better, though even that is probably not the actual requirement)
  • JDK 1.8

To build

  • Gradle (I think?)
  • Android Studio 3 (what I used, and should include Gradle already, but maybe you know better if you're already familiar with Android)
  • wget
  • Perl 5.18 or better
  • Mojolicious (web framework for Perl)

I use Perl and Mojolicious as built from perlbrew and CPAN-minus, but if your distribution or OS comes with the right versions then those should work too.

How to Build

This is how I did it:

  1. Prepare the mobile-ready HTML and images (which are not included with this source distribution).
    1. Spider the HTML and images from the NPC website (using scripts/spider-script.sh)
    2. Change to the public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/support/uniforms folder. Copy the entire uniformregulations folder (including all contents) to compiled-regs, which should be a sibling of uniformregulations. This is mostly to capture the images, which are a mishmash of .jpg, .JPG, .gif, and a stray .png. The HTML files will be overwritten.
    3. Change to the uniformregulations folder.
    4. Use the scripts/build-script.sh script, which itself relies on the aptly-named scripts/read-file.pl Perl script, to generate the prepped HTML in the ../compiled-regs folder.
    5. Copy the compiled-regs folder (including all contents) to the app/src/main/assets folder. You might want to wait to do this until after you've loaded up the project in Android Studio.
  2. Import this ZIP file contents as a project in Android Studio.

But, you probably just want to run the scripts/prepare-for-build.sh script which should more or less mirror those steps.

Note that I'm not a Java wizard, the last time I did anything appreciable in Java, the ant tool still had the new car smell. So while I've tried to avoid over-importing my local project settings into this ZIP file, I may have left too much. Android Studio worked very well for me though so I'm sure it can figure this out too, however you manage to import this as a project.

Once you've done 1) and 2) you should be able to build the Gradle project in Android Studio and generate an APK that contains the Navy regs in a reasonably easy-to-browse fashion.

They're still Navy regs, this won't make them any shinier, but it demonstrates the concept.

Why on Earth?...

So, I may or may not have told a smattering of Navy Captains that making the most basic of apps containing the Navy uniform regs could be done as a weekend project.

Turns out that to their credit, no one wanted to push a "garage project" app on Navy sailors, but all the same I wanted to see if I could do it.

As it turns out, I could.

Michael Pyne <[email protected]>

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Weekend project for a shell Android app to display U.S. Navy uniform regulations without comms

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