Develop Reference

How to make a third dependency or jar in Android studio?

As a new android developer, I just know how to import the third dependencies made by other android developers.But now ,I write a simple custom view ,including a class : enter image description here and a declare-styleable:enter image description here,for convenience for the future,I want make it to a dependency or a jar.I don't know how to do it.Thanks for your help!

A .jar is a compiled Java bitcode for the jvm. Google android Java compiles into dex and it packed into a .apk. I would be utterly shocked if you could ever use a jar file. In general android apks files contain everything needed to run the app they don't tend to depend on anything else.
You can setup intents to pass things around throughout the larger environment but in general if you need the code for several projects, just include the source to be recompiled. You might be able to directly include a .dex but it would certainly not be preferred.

Incremental build for Android project using Ant

My server needs to keep building a large amount of Android projects. All of them are almost identical except for minor change on manifest.xml or any resource file (if it's better for the task) for each build. To reduce cost and improve efficiency, I try to implement incremental build. My planned procedures are:
after the first successful build, skip all the previous
procedures (aapt to generate R.java, adle to make java, etc.)
directly call aapt to make resource files, e.g., *.ap_
call apkbuilder to make classes.dex and usigned.apk
make signed.apk
So my question is whether the above solution is possible? And any clue about how to implement it?

This isn't necessarily a solution for your particular requirements but perhaps it will provide you with some useful pointers.
I have an Antlib that I use for building Android projects. You probably won't want to use it yourself as it has some drawbacks, but it should serve as an example of how to perform the various steps to build an Android app using Ant. In particular, it shows how to call the various Android SDK tools from Ant and how to use the Ant uptodate task and Ant's if and unless attributes to avoid processing files that haven't changed.
The source for the Android Ant macros is here (the Antlib documentation might help you to make sense of what it's doing).

android aapt in eclipse

i saw some info regarding this question in several threads but non suited my condition.
I have an android application which i now need to customized some resources and code.
For the time being i have some problems using android library so i have an ant build that copies base resources and Assets plus specific ones to my android project and than changes the package name in the manifest as needed. All my activity have constant path and non relative to the package name so that's not an issue.
The problem is with the R object in the gen folder that is generated in the aapt. aapt does have a parameter to not use the android manifest package but another one, but it's available only if i use the ant build file, the parameters for the ADT are hard coded in the plugin.
has anyone found solution to this ? i mean i can always use ant task to change all R references (imports) but it looks to me error prone. Any way except wrapper script that wont do it on windows to customize aapt ?

again... no answer for my question, i'll start thinking you guys got something against me.
in short, i see there's no solution, the things i can do:
use ant task that regexps all the import com....R; to the new package - disadvantage: even the smallest issue with the regexp i may mess something up in the code that will show only in runtime.
use wrapper script around aapt.exe or aapt binary that adds --custom-package my.package.name that even if i change the manifest package will keep the original R files, for both ant and eclipse - disadvantage, some: 1. on windows this needs to be an exec file as eclipse looks for one it took me a while to build one properly in C, on linux\mac this could be a script of any kind so we need 2 versions of it\ 2. every update to the SDK we need to install the wrapper all over again.
edit the ant tasks jar code to allow --custom-package and edit the adt source code to enable in the menu custom parameters - this is great feature that should be included! but the disadvantage is until the code is accepted (if it is accepted) and added to the SDK itself , i'll needs to merge my changes every new SDK emerges, unlike #2 this is a lot harder.
I chose option #2, for now i have executable for windows, and i'll check options for Linux and mac (probably simple bash script) once i'm there, and i'll create a python installation script and save it all in the svn along with my build project.
Good luck to everyone....

ANTLR and Android

is there any guide how to use ANTLR on Android? I have found some ANTLR portation for Android but it looks like being without any tutorial or manual. Do you know where to find some? (and yes, I have been googling...)
Thx

After reading the README from this ANTLR port:
AntlrJavaRuntime - Earlence Fernandes, The CRePE Project, VU Amsterdam
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Runtime is available as an external library against which apps can link.
It provides the necessary mechanisms to execute Lexer/Parser code generated by the ANTLR tool.
The model is offline, in the sense that the parser/lexer is generated off the mobile phone on a desktop computer.
The resulting files are transferred to an Android project which then uses this library.
Building
~~~~~~~~
lunch the appropriate target
make AntlrJavaRuntime
verify that AntlrJavaRuntime.xml was placed in /system/etc/permissions and AntlrJavaRuntime.jar was placed in /system/framework
after this, you can run a normal make
It seems to me that the only difference is when you want to run your parser on an Android device (or -emulator) you must include the AntlrJavaRuntime in your Android project/app.
So, writing the grammar, generating a parser and lexer from said grammar would be the same as on a "normal" machine. Here's a previous Q&A that shows how to write a simple expression parser: ANTLR: Is there a simple example?
EDIT
Also see this Q&A: android ANTLR make not working properly

I'm not sure what "using ANTLR" means to you. Here's what it means to me:
I'm assuming that you will create a grammar, generate the parser/lexer Java classes, compile them, deploy them in your Android app, and then let them parse whatever your app sends into an AST.
If you want to know how to do that, there's no better place than the ANTLR documentation or the book you can buy from Amazon.

There is an Android Studio (actually IntelliJ) plug-in for this, called "ANTLR v4 grammar plugin".
This tutorial worked for me.
In short, simply copy grammar (a .g4 file) into your project, right-click on it > Configure ANTLR...
From there you can select to generate Java or Kotlin files, which will compile and run once you added the runtime in your dependencies:
implementation 'org.antlr:antlr4-runtime:4.7'

How to have both Debug and Release apk on same device?

While continuing to develop my application and test it on a real phone, I need to have the release version of it on the same phone, for demonstration purposes (the release version is much more responsive, thanks to no-logs).
The problem is that the only way to make two applications co-exist on the same device in Android is by having different package names.
But package names require re-factoring and lots of propagating manual fixes... not to mention that this confuses version control...
Ideally, Eclipse+ADT would allow appending a modifier variable that would automatically generate a different package name for debug/release and would allow such co-existence, but I couldn't find any mechanism that allows doing that.
Do you know of any way to workaround this?
Creative solutions and ideas are welcome.

Use Android Studio because gradle make your life a lot easier - just use applicationIdSuffix
android {
...
buildTypes {
release {...}
debug {
applicationIdSuffix '.debug'
}
}
}
For more go here.

The only way I know is to change the package name in your applications manifest file. Eclipse should handle all the code renaming for you.

Could you put all your code in a Library Project and then just have two normal projects,
that have different package names and just include the library project in both?
This should keep all your code in one place.
The normal projects would most likely only need a valid manifest file that points to the
activities in the library project.

You may want to try this technique using ant, Jenkins and perhaps other tools to automate package renames as suggested by #LAS_VEGAS.
Although not what you asked for, this cool code snippet can help you find out at runtime whether your code is debug or release.
Another interesting such attempt can be found in this thread. I am not sure though if it works on Android.

In Android Studio, Adding build variants using Product Flavours which can be easily customized for various environments and to test side by side multiple app variants of same app. Check out this link for more information - Configuring Gradle