Hi there, My name is Stephen and I’m a final year UCD Computer Science student and one of the new Android interns at MercuryGirl Inc. Having been developing for the last six months or so on Android, I’d thought I’d throw in my two cents on what developing for this platform is like.
The Good
- Android is all about Java: the entire SDK is written in a slightly modified flavour of Java. If you have written a normal JRE class, it’s effortless to slot it into your existing Android project. Studying in UCD means you get a firm grounding in Java, so writing for Android comes fairly naturally to me.
- Eclipse. In short, I’m a big fan. It’s available on virtually any platform you care to mention (*cough* X Code *cough*), has some great extensions & plugins, allows for multiple workspaces and integrates nicely with Android.
- DDMS. A view (see screenshot below) in Eclipse which details what’s going on inside either the emulator or the physical phone at any moment in time. It can tell you what processes are running, what the state of the file system is in, what threads are running and a system printout. You can attach debuggers to find where you’re going wrong (usually multiple places with my code!) and view multiple emulators/phones running at the same time. It’s a very useful resource and simple to use.
- ID’s for resources. When creating a layout, you can reference any image with a unique id. This makes things a lot easier than say, writing out an explicit filepath and crossing your fingers that the file is there on startup. With Eclipse, you can easily tell if a resource you’ve called actually exists which can be very useful when you use a fairly (read: EXTREMELY) illogical naming system for images.
- Online support. While the online SDK is great for quick references there are times when you just have to say “how the hell do I call that method” or “why won’t it let me do that?!”. At these times your best bet is to search the Android group forums and see if you’re query has been previously addressed. The sample programs which are also on the SDK website are a great help as well.
The Bad
Let’s skip to the just plain ugly because these issues REALLY grind my gears.
The Just Plain Ugly
- Assets. This is a folder which allows you to package files with your application such as mp3s or videos. They’re stored in the application’s own directory upon installation and can be accessed by creating an Asset Manager. But that’s the problem, there’s only access to read these items, no writing to them! An application I’m currently writing requires the use of two text files to write and store configurations – pretty basic and you would have thought you could keep these files in the application’s own directory. Wrong! I have to resort to creating these files on the SD card (if the phone has one) to be able to write to them. Come on guys, surely you could allow access to writing to text files in the phones own directory!
- Very limited configuration scope. In Android, you can set program configurations using a native class. However this is of very limited scope – you can only give each configuration an ID and a boolean (true/false) value. Surely the Android team could give this class more fields such as a strings or integers to store as well.
- The layout window. This is where you define the components (buttons, text fields, images etc.) that will make up your window. When I first played around with the SDK back at version 1.0 you had to manually define where all these things went by playing around with their XY coordinates (which, incidentally was always buried somewhere in the middle of the large list of properties) and then switch views to see if you’re editing produced the right result. Surely, I thought, this will be one of the areas they’ll fix in the 1.5 SDK. Not a chance. Unfortunately it’s still as cumbersome as ever and a world away from the slick X Code world of dropping and dragging.
- No development mode on the phone. When you plug the phone in for the first time, Windows tries to grab whatever driver it reckons is appropriate. If you want to develop on this phone though, you have to manually tell Windows to go search in the SDK folder for the right driver. What, are we back in the year 1998?! Surely when you plug the phone in an option could come up on the screen which would allow you to enter development mode and the right drivers could then auto-install.
Anyway, that pretty much sums up my experiences so far. Please sound off in comments if you reckon I’ve been too harsh or not harsh enough!
Nice blog post.
I’m thinking of getting into the world of Android developing but it’s a steep learning curve. Attending DIT it’s all about C so the world of Java-Android is a jump.
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