I'm using Eclipse v 3.7.2 to develop Android apps. I've been at it a few months and making some decent headway and am not sure I want to rebuild my development environment.
I don't doubt that Eclipse has been improved, but has it been improved for android development?
Before I rebuild my environment I'd like to know why should I fix it.
Can any one tell me if they have found any major feature advantages to upgrading to version 4 of eclipse?
I tried posting in the android enthusiasts group to find the question was "off topic", as there are many developers here I hope ye don't mind a non coding related question.
There is absolutely no need to rebuild anything. From your 3.7.2 installation you should be able to update your installation to 3.8 in place. Use Help->Check for updates with the 3.8 specific update site: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.8
That way you get all the bug fixes and changes of the last release cycle, but do not need to switch to the e4 version of Juno. For you as Eclipse user the changes in the modeled workbench and CCS styling are not really important.
Note: Updating in place might be a problem if you use Linux and have installed Eclipse via a repository manager.
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I used to be an Android developer for 2 years, but over 2 years ago. I believe that things changed - we have Android Studio, Gradle and probably more tools that I'm not aware of right now.
What is the current development stack for creating Android applications? What tools should we used right now?
I used to use eclipse with ant, but as far as I can see, a lot of people are using AS with Gradle, which is, for my first experience, extremely slow.
How to jump back into Android development after some time of not being up to date with development stack?
Eclipse vs Android Studio is a matter of choice. You can get used to it within hours, or you can continue with Eclipse. I am using both tools for different projects.
Android Studio seemed to be more stabile at some points.
Update on Android SDK and third party libraries are more easily handled with Android Studio.
Android Studio has not NDK support yet. You have to compile native codes outside of Android Studio. Edit:(Well, actually it has support but claimed to be deprecated, probably developers are working on a better solution)
Edit2:(It will be soon officially supported with C/C++ debugger)
With Android Studio you can use java7 syntax, but you have to stick with java6 syntax on Eclipse. Edit:(you can now force java8 with a plugin on A.S and I guess java7 is usable on eclipse too) Edit2:(java7 is a must now for both parties, but still java8 syntax can only be used in A.S with a help of plugin)
Google releases example codes compatible with Android Studio saying eclipse versions will be available soon.
Android Studio has better GUI designer.
Android Studio has better refactoring capabilities.
The most important change is SDK itself, actually. Just check if Android Studio is good enough for you and study on SDK.
It depends on your project. For non critical or hobby projects you should definitely start with AS and Gradle right away because this the the future of Android development. Although it is still in 'beta' and it can break some stuff after a new upgrade, it has many new features which make you more productive and happier in development.
If you have a critical project and you don't want to spend your time with checking and fixing things your are not supposed to fix, you should stick back to Eclipse, at least until AS is released.
Independently on whether you use AS or Eclipse, you should already start learning and using Gradle. It works perfectly for both options. If you hesitate you can even keep Ant and Gradle building your project in parallel. They work together and don't overlap.
I have been using Android Studio the last year and I can say that it is a very powerful tool, that I believe, in the next year, will overcome Eclipse.
When AS was still in version 4.+ Alpha, there were some issues (mostly with external libraries .jar) but since beta was released and up until now almost every bug was fixed.
Moreover, AS is better when it comes to indexing and suggestions. You will be surprised by its suggestion system, which helps you save a lot of time when coding.
I still use eclipse for other projects, but I believe for Android Development AS is the tool you should invest in, if not for now, definitely for the future.
We are using both, Android Studio and the good old Eclipse IDE. We noticed, that it basically depends on what you're doing. Android Studio is good enough for developing from now and it will replace Eclipse soon. However, it has some drawbacks where Eclipse is your choice. A small comparison was made by Google themselves: https://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html
Eclipse: Eclipse is very stable and works perfectly with ant driven builds. However, if you want to use gradle, there's some work to do to get the build process working with eclipse. We tried to use Eclipse with Gradle but the Gradle Plugin was quite buggy at this time. If you want to use native C code, you must use Eclipse, as Android Studio does not support that, yet.
Android Studio: Looks great and does also a very good job. The gradle integration works much better there. This is a big advantage over Eclipse when you have to deal with many dependencies. This is probably not an issue for small projects. But, if you're developing projects with additional libraries or frameworks you should definitely give Gradle a try. I hope, that the NDK support is coming soon, so that we can switch to AS completely. Ant builds are someway out-dated.
First of all, I will not debate about Android Studio vs Eclipse as it's an opinion based discussion and a kind of a troll...
The Android development basically the same : the base tools still ADB, Android SDK, Java language... So you can continue to use a "notepad" and compile, build and deploy by the SDK tools.
However, like in every development project, you could choose your upper level tools. Your question is about IDE and building system. This is only a matter of choice.
Android Studio and Gradle are still in beta phase for Android developments and you could use them only if you keep this in mind. You could continue to use Eclipse and Maven or switch to Android Studio and Gradle or keep using Eclipse but moving from Maven to Gradle... just make what you prefer.
The Android development stack evolved this way :
Basics tools : Text editor, SDK tools
First IDE : Eclipse with ADT plugin (can run your program from an IDE)
Industrialisation phase : Eclipse ADT + Maven (dependencies management, building process management...)
Coming phase : Android Studio (IntelliJ based) + Gradle (you can compare Gradle to Maven, but this is another discussion)
I think that other answers will give you personnal points of view about Eclipse vs Android Studio, Maven vs Gradle, etc... which is a really personnal choice ;)
My development stack for Android :
IntelliJ 14
Maven
Android SDK
plus my own OSS Framework to ease the pain of Android for a Java EE developer
Reasons:
IntelliJ is the best available IDE imo
Maven is pretty mature
The plugin has become useable
The workspace integration Maven -> IntelliJ is working great (both, using maven builds and deriving IDE builds from maven)
If Android Studio (which is in great parts IntelliJ) has become slow, it come due to the gradle stuff. I had a large scale project based on gradle and made these experiences :
Slow, Slower, gradle (up to 2GB memor consumption for building an app)
Xml is horrible, but gradle dsl is imo even worse
Switching to gradle 2.1 broke the predicate logic (e.g. formerly working project.hasProperty("foo") && property.ext.foo.equals("bar") does not work any more, this must not happen during a MINOR release
Compared with maven's xml hell, gradle leaves a callow, unmature impression on me, especially building with gradle is hell of a slow job compared with maven.
But - and this is my true oppionion - if gradle is pushed by google and gradleware, it definitely has the potential to become the next generation building tool, although I doubt that the flexibility in gradle will ever lead to a proper IDE workspace build derivation. From my point of view, the choice for gradle over maven done by google happened in a too early state.
just my two cents.
PS: Try tuning the memory settings. Give more memory to IDEA (e.g. 2GB in a 64bit enviroment). My experience with IntelliJ is, that the default mem settings are too small. You can find it in $InstallDir/bin/idea.exe.vmoptions resp. $InstallDir/bin/idea64.exe.vmoptions
EDIT: This is not intended to be gradle bashing. Gradle has large potentials indeed. This post reflects my experiences during my last project basing on gradle (non-Android). For beginners gradle might be the better choice since it is a lot easier than maven.
I have php and .net programming experience.
I want to set up a development system on a windows 7 64 bit PC. I could do with database usage at a later date. I want to do it as hard coding not use software that you just drag and drop objects to play games.
I have already downloaded and installed jdk-8u20-windows-x64.exe
What do I need to do next and in what if any order.
Get your Android SDK and Eclipse IDE here
https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
As this is not a programming question please use Google Search or a source specific to your problem next time.
It's quite simple really. I would suggest using Android Studio, which can be found here :
Download Android Studio
It says it's a beta version but I have (and I'm not the only one) been using it for production without issues for months now. It's really a question of preference but as far as I'm concerned, I found my productivity to be much higher on Android Studio than it was using Eclipse.
Once it is installed, find the SDK manager and download the latest SDK version, build tools and other things you may need (such as the USB driver for debugging, the support library, ...) :
I highly recommend you go through the training on the official documentation page to start getting used to your new toys :-)
I am currently using the Helios version of Eclipse (v. 3.6) for Android development. I have read about the Galileo version (v. 3.5) as well. Before downloading I wanted to know what are the better features of Galileo over Helios (especially for Android development)?
I'm using the 3.6.1 version, which is an Helios version -- the current one being 3.6.2 -- and experience no problem with it.
Considering that Helios is more recent that Galileo, you should probably go with Helios -- after all, for most android-related stuff, it's the ADT plugin that should matter, and not the Eclipse version.
If you have read much about Galileo, it's probably because it was the current version when many people started developping for android.
But the documentation only says :
3.4 or newer is recommended
As a reference : releases of Eclipse, on Wikipedia.
I have had problems with Helios 3.6.1 in that content assist will freeze the system. This bug was introduced with the release of Helios (i.e. it does not affect Galileo). The bug is known and has been fixed for 3.6.2 and 3.7.
See: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=325829 for more detail.
So short answer, use either one but be sure to use the latest version of that release.
-Dan
There is an old thread where we talk about the slow auto-complete issue. I posted a fix
there
If you're looking for a great Android development environment, you might want to consider IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition) It's free, and editing all the Android XML files is a pleasure with it. Not too shabby for Java development either!
I'm using Helios as well.
I found a good guide on how to get started, and if you aren't that good with Git and repositories for getting you the source code as well:
Here it is
Both should be just as fine, but I've seen Helios act a lot slower when exporting signed APKs (that's an action I only do once in a while, so it doesn't matter much). Just make sure you're always using the latest ADT plugin.
EDITED
Thought I'd follow up a bit more and add the info here (as opposed to adding more comments below).
After installing Galileo and finding it went well and no android problems, I installed Helios. It too went well and no Android problems (yet).
I did add the necessary lines to the eclipse config ini file to increase Memory size and added Garbage Collection. When I did this to Gannymede, it made a significant speed improvement but, I don't see any effect in either Galileo or Helios. Makes me think that since they are not natively added for these two versions (at least not for 64-bit Cocoa / Mac), they may not be used. Nonetheless, they seem to have no negative affect. If anyone has knowledge to share on this, I'm all ears...
Thanks
I'd like to get opinions on updating Eclipse for Android development.
I currently use Eclipse (Ganymede) 3.4.2. on a Mac (duo core intel)
I've read many posts regarding this and, while there are differing opinions, probably mostly with regard to the interface. I have read about issues with the Android SDK and ADT with Eclipse versions above 3.4.2. but, thus far, all posts seem to be prior to the Android Dev site recommending the following (they previously recommend not using above 3.4):
Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) or greater
Eclipse JDT plugin (included in most Eclipse IDE packages)
If you need to install or update Eclipse, you can download it from
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.
Several types of Eclipse packages
are available for each platform. For
developing Android applications, we
recommend that you install one of
these packages:
o Eclipse IDE for Java Developers
o Eclipse Classic (versions 3.5.1 and higher)
o Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers
Some questions:
Is there an advantage in switching from 3.4.2 Ganymede to Classic 3.5.1?
Is it worth the trouble?
Is anyone having compatibility issues with Android and the ADT? using 3.5.1?
Thanks - any input/recommendations are appreciated...
I don't encounter noticeable problems with Helios (3.6.1). We bundle Helios (Classic more or less) and a bunch of plugins we write together with ADT to form MOTODEV Studio. As a general rule, the integration and support for Android have gotten better with each Eclipse release. I don't believe the Android team tests against Ganymede any longer, so at the very least I'd suggest moving to Galileo.
I'm working on an Android project now where everyone (about 12 people) are using the Eclipse Galileo IDE 3.5.2. That decision was made last year when that version was relatively current. But we're at a good milestone where, if we wanted to make any changes, this would be a good time to do it, although we're not having any problems with Galileo. We're using the latest SDK.
Where can I get an idea of what the differences and improvements are between the different versions of Eclipse Classic's, (e.g. Galileo vs Helios) so I can form an opinion about whether we should switch to the latest version? (the latest version of Classic is 3.6)
Thanks for any comments.
The Eclipse Project download page for each major release has a link to a New and Noteworthy page which has an overview of the new stuff.