Android Development

I have recently started programming for the Android platform. This post is the first in what I plan to be a series discussing my experience writing code for this environment. That being said, I'll jump right into it.

We chose the Android platform for our application because it offered a lot of capabilities that we could take advantage of right out of the box (camera for video/image capture, GPS for location-awareness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for fast data transfer, etc). The free/open nature of the platform was also appealing. At this point, I've implemented the core use cases for all those features and am now concentrating on improving the user experience, bug fixes, and overall polishing. So far, I have no regrets as I have not yet come across a use case I could not implement in a fairly straightforward manner.

At the risk of sounding like a Google Fanboy, I have to say that I really do enjoy working on the Android platform. The core reason is that Google really put a lot of thought/effort into the SDK and development tools. For Eclipse users, there is an Android Development Tools plug-in that makes building and debugging applications as simple as a single click. Additionally, since Android has gone through a fairly rapid evolution and there is a wide variety of devices running a number of different versions of the OS, the emulator provided with the SDK makes it simple to test different device configurations running differing platform versions. While emulators are great for initial debugging, there is no substitute for running on an actual device. Since the platform is designed to be open, deploying one's applications to a real device is as simple as turning on an option in the phone's settings menu, plugging it into your PC and clicking a button in Eclipse. Again, none of these things are groundbreaking, but having full IDE support makes it much easier to concentrate on the details of the application rather than the nuances of packaging.

That last point applies to a lot more than just Android. Whether it is IDE plug-ins or a life-cycle management tool like Maven, comprehensive tooling makes getting up and running on a project easy. I cannot overstate how much of a difference Maven has made on other projects, especially those with complex builds and many dependencies. That being said, I am planning on trying to integrate Maven with my Android builds using this plug-in shortly (for reasons I'll outline in a subsequent post).