My Experiences with Android Development
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Join For FreeBecause I was missing coding, and because my friend and I had an awesome
phone app idea at the weekend, I thought I'd try my hand at developing
an Android application this week.
I want to give a quick overview of my preliminary thoughts on getting started on this endeavour.
Background: I've got more than 10 years Java experience, but any UI for
the applications I've worked on was always a web UI. I am completely new to mobile app development.
Getting Started
I spent maybe a day and a half reading the excellent Android developer documentation and attempting to hack out a quick 'droid app.
I was surprised to find the Application Fundamentals
section actually made sense to me. There appears to be a clear
architecture with design guidelines laid out for developers to follow.
This shouldn't really be a surprise I suppose, but years of hacking
around with web UIs with poorly implemented MVC architectures must have
left me thinking that all frameworks are less "frame" and more "work".
Setup
I remember the disaster of trying to get my first JDK working on my 486 -
what a nightmare! And getting Tomcat 3 installed and running? Forget
it. I also remember the last time I made a serious stab at a learning a
new technology. I tried develop a Grails/Groovy
application in Eclipse. The IS guys had to rescue my laptop from me
during that enterprise before I could do it any serious damage.
Installing the SDK on my mac was surprisingly simple, especially bearing
in mind I'm new both to OSX and to mobile development. I don't know if
it's because Android development has been well thought out and well
supported, or if it's a function of both the industry's maturity and my
own experience.
The integration with IntelliJ
was much slicker than I expected, especially since I'm using the
freebie Community edition. I don't remember the exact steps to tell it I
wanted to create an Android project, but it must have been ridiculously
easy otherwise I would remember the trauma. I do remember a little
confusion around installing the Android platform - I hadn't understood
the difference between installing the SDK and then installing a specific
API for it. But the documentation and the android
application got me on the right track in the end. And then when I
clicked the "run" button in IntelliJ, hey presto! The emulator appeared
and there was my app!
- I was pleasantly surprised to be able to get an Android application (albeit a very basic one) working in only a few hours.
- Development in IntelliJ was much easier than I expected.
- The documentation is actually very good.
From http://mechanitis.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-intro-to-android-development.html
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