Few months back I broke up my long term affair with Mono and I started looking into the the Play Framework from TypeSafe as a replacement stack.
Through Play Framework, I discovered Scala and the wonders of functional programming. My interest grew even deeper when I installed Scala on my laptop and tried some example code in the REPL tool (think Scala interactive shell).
However, I found very soon that I was not able to dedicate enough time during the week to learning Scala due to my full time day job doing .Net development.
Something had to be done.
I thought, I have this wonderfully powerful device on me all the time - my Nexus 5. Surely, I should be able to put it to use to help me spend more time with Scala. So began the experiment.
I rooted my Nexus 5, installed "Linux Deploy" from Google Play Store and installed a chroot Arch Linux environment. I also installed JuiceSSH client and a VNC viewer application. I already had "Terminal IDE" installed which comes with a great android keyboard geared towards software development on Android.
The last piece to the puzzle, I bought a $25 ANKER bluetooth keyboard compatible with my Nexus 5.
I fired up the Arch chroot on my phone, downloaded tmux and vim using pacman and oracle java 7 packages from AUR (some PKGBUILD tweeking was needed).
Then I installed TypeSafe Activator from AUR. I also downloaded vim plugins like vim-scala and CtrlP which proved to be of great help.
It worked!!!
Using the setup described above, I was able to not only learn how to program Scala, I am also able to write software using Play Framework. I can test the same on my phone's browser. The code is backed up on github and I can work on the same codebase from anywhere - as long as I have my Nexus 5 and data connection.
And after the recent KitKat update with Cast Screen - I am able to cast my phone's screen to my big screen HD TV over ChromeCast. This solves the issue of developing on the relatively small Nexus 5 screen.
This experience has made me appreciate VIM, TMUX, and the terminal in general at a whole new level. Even when on my laptop, I now find myself doing more and more coding in VIM instead of IntelliJ.
Think about it, you can now get a decent android box or even a phone, and with a setup similar to what I described, have an almost full fledged development environment. Rich graphical applications can be written in Scala using Swing (sigh) and possibly other graphical toolkits and can be tested within the Arch (or other Linux distro) chroot using VNC.
Side note about Oracle Java instead of OpenJDK: I went with Oracle Java instead of OpenJDK due to an "issue" with OpenJDK on arm chips. Its something to do with JVM running in "mixed mode".
