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

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!

They have now released Smart TV SDK 4.0 which includes support for Linux & Mac OS X: http://www.samsungdforum.com/SamsungDForum/NewsView?newsID=27

"In addition to the Eclipse-based App Editor, a new Linux-based Emulator has been released.
This Emulator executes in an Ubuntu virtual machine that is run in the Virtual Box virtualization tool."

■ Features for 2013 Platform on Linux (First Release)

• Apps Framework
• App Engine / WebKit
• UniPlayer
• SEF (Service Extension Framework)

You need to register to Samsung D forum and then you can download the SDK from https://www.samsungdforum.com/Devtools/SdkDownload

One tip that I have not seen mentioned in any of the answers, is that the TV will attempt to open a socket connection on port 45634 of the machine where the app was downloaded from (the one with the widgetlist.xml).

All debugging (alerts() calls), will be sent over this port, allowing for remote debugging.

I use NetCat to open a port and dump all logs, like so:

nc -l 45634