Android Development with Eclipse at EclipseCon 2011

Torn and Xavier first presented to us an overview about the eclipse tooling provided

  • Java edition : based on JDT
  • Debugging : using ADB, that is running as an host on your desktop, and also on your phone or emulator; for the users, just click on the usual debug button, and the magic happens (connection between host and client adb); everything is supported, except hot code replacement.
  • Logcat is the view that enables you to see all the text outputs
  • Heap view : to see the the state of the memory, when profiling, results can be exported to be opened with Eclipse Memory Analyzer
  • Integration testing is also made available, by deploying the integration tests package to the phone, to run it against the test app; the results will be sent back to Eclipse.
  • signing your applications, using other dialogs to access your keystore.
  • Text editors (XML editors) : many guis are provided : the manifest editor where you can define your your activities, versions, permissions through many tabs,
  • the UI editor , where you can drag and drop widgets, all shown in a convenient drop down menu : no need anymore to go to the xml view, everything is there; moreover, you can also use the graphical editor to load a layout written in Java; there is the ability to edit nested layouts; to set the the screen size (convenient if you want to see what it will look like on a tablet compared to a phone) and also to change from portrait to landscape
  • Animation editor : same thing, based on XML with a graphical editor to handle all the cases

They ended the presentation giving some links where you can find the online resources such as the source code, project site (android tooling), bugs, mailing lists, etc..

Questions :

  • what about the integration of Maven, using the already existing Maven tooling for Android ? it is open source, so if they want to contribute to the Android tooling project, they could.
  • Is there a CI website showing the build results ? Not a public one.

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/sessions/?page=sessions&id=2293