A road named NoNameUno

I was looking at Android to see how it works, and how I could develop some application(s) or hack the linux kernel. Anything new makes me feel like I'm a moron. So I started off slow, and encounter quite a few problems that I would like to discuss here in couple upcoming blog topics.

My first approach was to get the application development environment ready, so that I can build some simple applications and try it out on an emulator, since I'm not ready to invest on devices and other board support packages needed to do any serious development.

I looked at the online documents published by google, and subscribed to a few of the google groups. I have been using eclipse for just about 3 months because my previous job was posix compiant middleware, and was looking for one IDE that spans between Windows and Linux when it comes to using it seemlessly. If you don't know eclipse is based on java, and its default environment is Java, but there is a lot of plug-ins that gives you other development facilities. For example, the CDT gives the c/c++ development environment.

What you need for android is to get the android sdk, and android plug-in for eclipse. Once you have that, searching a few online sites gives enough information to get the android application development environment going. Note that once you have the environment set, you can either build a simple application with generated java code to build and test. This has been explained in some online sites. Also you can create a project from existing sample projects that come with the sdk. For running a built project, you need to create AVD ( android virtual device). AVDs are somewhat tied to sdk version, so you need to know what version of sdk you want to use. In my case I've seen three different types: v1.1, v1.5, and Google API version. I stick to sdk 1.5, since it is the latest and I did not yet look at Google API.

To create AVDs, you can use the tools that come with sdk. For a reference look at - http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/avd.html. As soon as you create an AVD, it would show up in your eclipse environment. Just look under -

Windows->Preference  or Windows->Android DVD Manger.

Once you have the device manager configured, you should be able to run your application on emulator. But be watchful about the starting of the device ( in this case your emulator).  I've seen it gets stuck, and sometime it is just slow. If it is stuck, you might need to kill the emulator window by closing it, then re-run the application. For more informations on the status of the AVD etc., you need to look at the documents to use the tools from the sdk. There are couple of useful tools under the tools subdirectory of your sdk installation directory.