I was planning to try to learn Android, and I have totally no knowledge on Android development.
But Vim is my favorite editor, so I prefer Vim rather than Eclipse.
How do I set up this environment, and how do I run it (from beginning to the end)?
Currently in,
~/.vim/bundle/
I already got
- conque-shell
- nerdtree
- supertab
- command-t
- taglist
...etc.
these plugin. Are there other plugins that I should add in?
I would strongly recommend you to use Vim plugin Eclim for Android development in Vim. I used it, and I found it extremely useful. Code autocomplete, refactoring and so on, is just awesome. Actually, when I started using Eclim, I got power of an IDE with my favorite editor Vim.
Also, you might want to read this publication about using Eclim for Android development.
You don't need any Vim plugins for Android development.
All you need is
Apache Ant for building the resulting app
A Java 5 compatible JDK
The Android SDK
Then you can use Vim to edit the AndroidManifest.xml, the layout.xmls, the Java source, the build.properties, the build.xml, and so on.
You need to know how to build an Android project by Ant.
I also use Vim to develop android project, and I have just created a Vim script for Android development. It is called adt.vim, and I am using it. I hope you will like it. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4330
If any suggestion, please tell me. It is still being improved.
Related
Is it required to have Intellij or Eclipse or can one simply write apps by simply using some editor like Sublime and Cordova CLI? Is there something I cannot do without using an IDE?
since a cordova application project conists of html and js files a text editor would be enough , i am using visual community code 1
No, its pretty easy to develop cordova not using an IDE. In fact it gives you a good understanding of whats really going on.
Take a look at the docs http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/5.0.0/guide_cli_index.md.html#The%20Command-Line%20Interface and create the example to get an idea. After that its just using the command line tool to add plugins and your editor to write html/js
You might miss the simulator that comes with the IDE. In particular, XCode. Testing on IOS simulator and publishing to the App Store is relatively easier using XCode.
But is IDE required? Not really.
If you need custom plugin for your app, you have to use an IDE since java classes from different packages must be imported. Thus, this work can be very waste of time without an IDE like Android Studio.
I am building C libraries that will be used by an android app(through either JNI or the NDK, I've never used the NDK though) and I am wondering what IDE/development environment is best to use? I've basically only used Visual Studio for native development and I'm not sure how to adapt to building .so libraries for use on android.
Thanks
EDIT: Update -- I want to avoid makefiles if possible (never used them) and rather use a complete IDE such as the case with visual stuido to compile
Generally, cygwin (i.e. command line) is used for building Android native code. But you can also try to use Eclipse for this purpose. It doesn't help very much but it highlights syntax and you don't have to switch to other apps to write code and build your app. You can read more about using Eclipse for C/C++ Android development here.
I would strongly recommend that you use the NDK's compiler.
Normally this is done by writing an Android.mk in accordance with the instructions for the NDK. It is not complicated. The easiest thing to do is to grab the hello-jni sample app and just make the necessary changes, for example substituting your source files into its android.mk.
You can stay in visual studio if you like that as an editing environment, simply using the ability to bind an external command to a keystroke to launch the ndk build script. Ages ago I had figured out how to reformat GCC error messages with sed into something that VS could parse to make them click-able, though I soon moved development of that project under linux.
I think a lot of people use Eclipse as their IDE for Android development. I use it and its pretty good. You shouldn't have any problems if you're used to VS.
The Android SDK comes with a plugin, the Android Development Tools (ADT), to develop applications for Android inside the Eclipse IDE, which is same kind of beast as Visual Studio. And within that IDE, it is possible to use JavaCPP (disclaimer: I am the author) to have it compile all the native C/C++ stuff we need through the Android NDK, but without needing Makefiles and such. More details here:
http://code.google.com/p/javacpp/#Instructions_for_Android
Do I need to use Eclipse IDE in order to develop in Android ? Most of the user guides insist on Eclipse !
No, it isn't. See developer.android.com for instructions on how to develop, both with and without eclipse.
Managing Projects from the Command Line and Building and Running from the Command Line, for example, shows how to manage and build a project (without Eclipse), respectively.
Eclipse is very good IDE for android application development. Otherwise there are other IDE's like:
Netbeans, JetBrains as mentioned by DAC
Plus you have got:
IntelliJ
No, it isn't; however, I don't see why you'd want to do otherwise. It greatly simplifies things when using Google's own SDK and Eclipse plugins.
I think it may be somewhat futile to develop for Android without an IDE if you plan on using the emulator, debugging and anything else that is useful for Android development; however, most of the other large Java IDE's support android:
NetBeans
JetBrains
No it's not. You could even use nicer languages like scala... (take with a pinch of salt)
I'd like to develop for Android but I don't really like using an IDE for programming as I find them to be pretty cumbersome compared to a text editor and command console. Is there any way I can develop for Android without doing so in Eclipse, and instead using Gedit? The system requirements specified on the Android developers site list Eclipse as a requirement, but I Ewas wondering if anyone had found a way to manually tap into the SDK libraries outside of Eclipse. I'm using a Linux setup as my development box.
You do not have to use Eclipse, it's just highly recommended because the tools are nicely integrated :
The recommended way to develop an
Android application is to use Eclipse
with the ADT plugin. The ADT plugin
provides editing, building, debugging,
and .apk packaging and signing
functionality integrated right into
the IDE.
However, if you'd rather develop your
application in another IDE, such as
IntelliJ, or in a basic editor, such
as Emacs, you can do that instead. The
SDK includes all the tools you need to
set up an Android project, build it,
debug it and then package it for
distribution. This document is your
guide to using these tools.
See this page on the Dev Guide for more info: Developing In Other IDEs
Yes you can do it with just the SDK and Ant (and the JDK of course). I'm doing it right now as an exercise in relearning Ant, and to make an 'idiot push button' procedure for a release build.
I've got to say that it's slow going just trying to configure the build process on sources that I know will compile. I'm glad that I've got Eclipse for the rapid development in the debug phase.
I'd like to build some native libraries for android using the NDK (native development kit), but i'd like to use Visual Studio 2010 to do it. I've googled quite a bit but haven't found any information on it. Does anyone have any experience with this and know the steps necessary to make this happen? I have CYGWin installed, made sure i get Make (per the NDK instructions), but i'm not really sure of the next steps in terms of setting up the project, compiler in visual studio, etc.
If anyone knows of any write-ups, tutorials, or links to sample projects, that would be awesome, as there isn't much on google yet.
thanks!
Here's another solution, which integrates the NDK fully within Visual Studio. No makefiles. It behaves like a proper Win32 project:
Here's an excellent blog post about how you can configure your environment to debug android NDK code using Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is officially not supported.
Some problems (but not limited to):
MSVS cannot create the proper ARM binaries
Android makefiles (.mk) are not supported by MSVS
There are however, third party solutions:
vs-android
VisualGDB
You might want to check out DS-5 as well, though it's not Visual Studio.
The answer depends on what kind of integration you require.
To just build the native Android code from Visual Studio you can create a new Makefile project, and make it run ndk-build.cmd when you press "build". If you would like to get the error messages mapped as well, you will need to parse the output of ndk-build.cmd and convert it to a format that Visual Studio can udnerstand.
If you want to debug your native Android code from Visual Studio, you will need a third party tool that will control ndk-gdb on behalf of Visual Studio and provide workarounds for several bugs (e.g. rebind breakpoints when libraries are loaded).
You can try our VisualGDB for Android tool that does exactly that - creates projects that wrap ndk-build and controls NDK debugger on behalf of Visual Studio. If you need more information, there is a step-by-step tutorial available.
I have not found a direct clean solution, here is my workaround.
I develop my native code on VS as a static library, and use some test project to try it as a console aplication.
When it is ok, from cygwin I use a little bash script that copies all needed files to the jni folder and launch the standard android ndk make command. (also copy some file to assets folder when needed), producing the executable in the right folder.
To use the pthreads I have linked my projects to pthreads-win32.
The only files I do not compile in VS are the jni code.
I hope this can help you.
There's also a couple of other third party alternatives for developing ANdroid apps with VS in addition to those above. There is the open source dot42 located at http://www.dot42.com and Remobjects, http://www.remobjects.com , which allows you to program in c#, Pascal, and Swift. I have played with the trial of Remobjects and am now starting to play around with dot42.
My use of the remobjects trial allowed me to recreate in c# the first five chapter projects in the textbook of the Android course I took. I haven't had the same success with dot42 so far but I need to find some time to really give it a chance.