My Experiences with Android Development

Because 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