Android Quickstart

A template project which will help you get started with Android development. It collects years of knowledge, tools and scripts to aid you with new projects.

It assumes that all developers use Eclipse or the ADT Bundle during development while Ant is used only for automated builds/CI. Consequences of this choice include inability to automate coding style checks, automate formatting of source code (which is done by Eclipse each time a file is saved anyways) and inability to use other IDEs (if consistency is of paramount importance). The rationale is that this simplifies the skeleton project: instead of trying to support all possible workflows we simply assume that code is written in Eclipse and integration is done by Ant.

Developed and tested on Ubuntu 12.04.1. It should work on all POSIX compatible environments provided that required dependencies are installed.

What's Inside

Project Management
- Apache Ivy to resolve/download JAR dependencies
- Python script to reference popular 3rd party Android libraries (which cannot be distributed as simple JAR files, thus cannot be downloaded by Ivy) libraries as git submodules and Android library dependencies.
- Python script to hardlink Google libraries (Cloud Messaging, Maps API, etc) from the SDK directory to the project libs/ directory.
Compatibility:
- Minimum platform version: android-15 (Android 4.0.3)
- Target platform version: android-17 (Android 4.2.0)
Coding style, static analysis:
- Checkstyle
- FindBugs
Boilerplate code/Output size reduction:
- Android Annotations
- ProGuard enabled by default
VCS/IDE support:
- Script to install Checkstyle and FindBugs plugins into an existing Eclipse installation

Dependencies

This stuff must be already installed on your system:

ADT Bundle with SDK Tools >= 21;
Apache Ant >= 1.8.0;
Apache Ivy >= 2.2.0-rc1;
Git >= 1.7.9;
OpenJDK 6;

Setup

Run these commands in a terminal:

# Clone the repository into its own 'quickstart' branch
git clone -o quickstart git://github.com/lvillani/quickstart-android
cd quickstart-android

# Branch off from 'quickstart' into 'master'
git branch master
git checkout master

# Re-generate local.properties
android update project -p .

# Resolve dependencies
ant resolve

Eclipse

This repository comes with a pre-configured Eclipse project. To use it click File -> Import -> General -> Existing Projects into Workspace and select the root directory of the repository you have just cloned.

Additional Resources

Android Kickstarter: http://androidkickstartr.com/
Android Views: http://www.androidviews.net/
Asset Studio: http://android-ui-utils.googlecode.com/hg/asset-studio/dist/index.html

FAQ

Q: Why don't you support IntelliJ, Maven, Emacs, Vi, Vim, ...?

A: Google and AOSP declared Eclipse as the offically supported IDE and Ant as the officially supported build tool. Sure, Eclipse is slow, bloated and gets mad from time to time and Ant is not as elegant as Maven but that's what comes in the box (Fun anecdote: we actually switched back from NetBeans/Maven to Eclipse/Ant because the alternatives were even worse than what was officially supported). Supporting official tools has the absolute priority over everything else.

License

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.

Unless you really want to, do not even mention that the copied content originates from this skeleton library. Its sole purpose is to be copied into other projects.

The above statements apply to all content in this skeleton library, even when the COPYING files, or the headers in the files state otherwise, they are just common examples.

androidabc08/quickstart-android