How to build & deploy a Samsung SmartTV app without the IDE (e.g: on Linux)

Question

Problem:

I'd like to try building a proof-of-concept app using the Samsung SmartTV SDK 2.5 (I have a 2011 model TV - UA55D8000).

Unfortunaltely, the SDK comes in two varieties that only seem to work on Microsoft Windows. It's weird because there's no reason it should be the case: the televisions themselves run Linux and applications are written in JavaScript.

This presents two problems:

1. As I don't have Microsoft Windows at home, I can't use the build environment (nor the TV emulator) that come with the SDK. (The SDK files themselves are just JavaScript)

2. Even if I had access to Windows, it's very hard to automate building & testing of the Apps without access to traditional build tools (e.g: Make, Ant, Autotools, etc)

How can I build Samsung Smart TV Applications on Linux? (i.e: without using the Windows-based build tools that come with the SDK)

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What I've figured out so far:

From what I can gather, a JavaScript-mode application is simply zip file containing an XML config file, one or more JavaScript files (including supplied JavaScript interface libraries for platform SDK functions), and any required assets (HTML, images, etc).

Also, from what I gather, deployment involves placing the zip file and an XML manifest file on a web-server network accessible to the TV, logging in as 'develop' on the TV and 'syncing' the application to the installed applications on the TV.

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Could someone point me to a source for the full deployment requirements & app bundle requirements? Or even just a working sample?

Answer 1

I've had a reasonable amount of success setting up a development environment on my Ubuntu machine and I'd like to share my methods here for anyone looking to do the same. This answer is intended to be platform independent, so the same advice should work on any fully fledged operating system.

Introduction

First off, the question's assumptions regarding app structure are correct. A JavaScript application consists of the following items:

• config.xml, a simple configuration file defining various settings and deployment information. See Writing the config.xml File on the official developer site.
• widget.info, a very small file with a few lines used to define the opacity of the application's body. This may not be required for full-screen applications.
• index.html, the main HTML file for your application.
• Images, sounds and other resources.

You can write these files using your favourite editor. I'm happily using vim with linting plugins for my JS and CSS.

Testing

As of version 4.0 of the SDK, a Linux version of the emulator is now available. This allows you to test your apps as they would appear on 2011-2013 TVs. For older TVs, you can run SDK 1.5's emulator in Wine, but emulators belonging to SDK 2.0 and newer will not run.

It is possible to run the emulators in a Windows virtual machine, and, with a little bit of trickery, you can make the emulators use your own application folder to look for apps. This involves sharing your development folders with your virtual machine, then creating a symbolic link to those folders, replacing the "apps" folder inside the SDK's installation directory. A quick overview of this process is available in an article titled, Your Windows IDE sucks? Replace it with Your Favorite Editor on the Mac!

Deployment

Samsung Smart TVs have a built-in developer account that allows you to send an application over from your computer for live testing on the television itself. You enter the IP address of your deployment server and the TV will look for a file called widgetlist.xml on that server. An example of the format is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rsp stat="ok">
  <list>
    <widget id="MyTVApp">
      <title>MyTVApp</title>
      <compression size="3383543" type="zip"/>
      <description>A basic application for Samsung TVs</description>
      <download>http://192.168.1.83/Widget/MyTVApp_0.1_America_20120709.zip</download>
    </widget>
  </list>
</rsp>

After that, it will download each app listed using the URL in the <download> tag. All you have to do is zip up the files, modify the widgetlist.xml accordingly and make sure both files are hosted in a web server running on your machine. You can use Apache, lighttpd or anything. I have a small node.js/connect app that will build the widgetlist.xml dynamically based on the zip files I have in a directory labelled deploy.

So there you have it. Development of Samsung Smart TV apps is not impossible without Windows. In fact, there's quite a few options available. Hooray!