I have a few drivers. Those provide device functionality.
Most of my apps have both a parent and a child app. The parent is the main interface, and the children are because I usually want more than one instance of the app running, each with their own configuration values.
I think I only have one app that has its own driver. (My Reliable Locks app) It creates a virtual device to go alongside the real physical lock device, so it needed its own driver. But I'd say the vast majority of apps don't need their own drivers.
Good luck and have fun and welcome to the community!
Oh and one more thing. I have an example of a very basic app that doesn't have any extra drivers and doesn't have any parent-child relationships:
It just enforces a minimum dimmer level for dimmers that don't support that inside their firmware. The logic in it is super basic, so it might be a nice Hello World example.
Seems like you got a lot of great input here. What I'll just add is that the ST documentation is a nice starting point, but there are MANY things HE supports that ST doesn't and some things are different. Don't take the ST documentation as gospel. Some things ST did are not implemented in HE, some things are done differently, and in many cases HE offers many other options that ST never did (remember ST Groovy development is dead now!)
Actually it's more similar than you might think. The closest thing ST had to a dashboard was device tiles, which were device only. Dashboard is the HE "equivalent" of that (different in a lot of ways) but it's also device based, not app. In my mind what people do with it (including myself) is a hack. Basically the dashboard only shows tiles for devices so people create "fake" (virtual) devices so that apps can display stuff on a dashboard as well. What you'll find when you look at some of the example apps and drivers is people are creative. They do things that maybe aren't clean or "proper" but it works. So are there apps that inject CSS and JavaScript into the HE interface? Yup! Does it work? Yup! Could the HE break it on us tomorow by changing HTML ids or classes? Absolutely! But it gets us the functionality we want today.
Yes, I got a lot of good information and suggestions. Lots to digest. I do appreciate the help and I can tell that this is a great community. It feels like what ST felt like in the beginning -- a platform for enthusiasts and hackers...
That's because if you look, you'll find many of us (including the HE team) started out as some of those folks on the ST forum. We just bailed when it became clear Samsung had other plans.
