About two months ago, Samsung started selling its Tizen-based smartwatch Gear Solo. I bought one and immediately started developing some apps for it. I know how to write apps based on Cordova, which basically means Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5) and JavaScript programming. As Tizen also supports writing HTML5- and JavaScript-based apps, I was interested to see if these two platforms can be compared and the apps easily transferred from one platform to the other. Unfortunately, the documentation provided by Samsung for its wearable platform is far below professional requirements. Thus, I was looking for books that explain Tizen development.

This book by Jaygarl et al. was the only one I could find about Tizen. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, “Getting Started,” explains how to set up your development platform (in my case, the Samsung wearable software development kit (SDK)).

Once you have mastered that part--including how to package an app--you can start developing. Tizen apps can be developed in two modes, as the authors explain: (a) based on the Tizen web application programming interface (API), and (b) writing Tizen native apps. As my Gear Solo only supports the web API, my practical experiences are restricted to web API-based solutions. In Part 2, after explaining the web API fundamentals, the authors describe several application areas, starting from location-based services to using the contacts and calendars. I was heavily interested in the messaging services (for example, short message service (SMS)), so I read chapter 8 thoroughly. The description was profound and explained with a lot of code. Unfortunately, as it turns out, Gear Solo does not really support this feature, so my learning experiences remained rudimentary.

The third part is about writing native apps. It first explains the user interface (UI) application model, things like handling events, and so on. Native apps are written in C++. If you know C++, writing native apps should not be a problem if you follow the different examples in the book. The authors first explain the UI controls needed to write an app. I also read the part about handling telephony and networking, as I thought this might be a way to solve my SMS task, but as written this is not supported for the Gear Solo.

The final chapters of the book, in Part 4, deal with advanced topics like multithreading and inter-application communication.

The book as such is easy to read; you will have no problems if you know either C++ or HTML5. But what you need is some kind of hardware platform to get real experiences with Tizen; learning just based on an SDK is not really very exciting. The authors explain the relevant areas with a lot of source code. So if you are a beginner in Tizen app programming, the book will help you to get running apps (like the “Hello World” example) in a short amount of time. The real hard part comes once you start detecting that your specific platform only supports a subset of the Tizen SDK, something the book cannot really help with or be blamed for.