Comments on: Automating Android with Ant

By: Bill Burke

Bill Burke — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:59:50 +0000

Thanks, I know this a linux mag, but, does work fine on windows 7,64bit (which is a surprise – most stuff abends). Had to fool around with path setting. Once I changed to the project directory level above bin worked fine. a lot of the commands changed between writting and now, but the hrlp screem pointed out what had changed.

By: mojavelinux

mojavelinux — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I\'ve got to barge in here. Ant needs to die. It has already produced way too many chaotic builds.

I do agree with your point that there needs to be another build in place that works outside the IDE. This best practice takes us back to the beginning of Java development, when projects were locked-in to the build mechanism a single IDE.

I\'m simply suggesting that we look for modern solutions such as Gradle or Maven (personally I think Gradle is the better fit).

By: fableson

fableson — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@mojavelinux
thanks for your thoughts -- I am hopeful that the topic of automating android builds will pick up speed now that Android is gaining more momentum in many quarters. I have seen some preliminary stuff done by Charlie Collins (one of my co-authors on Unlocking Android) a long while ago with Maven. I\'ll have to check out Gradle and follow up in a future column.

Thanks!

Frank

By: dragonwisard

dragonwisard — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@mojavelinux
Chaotic builds isn\'t a problem in Ant. It\'s just a case of \"Garbage in; Garbage out\". I\'ve seen horrific or incomprehensible builds written for Make or Maven too.

Your reasoning is suspect. It\'s like saying, \"I don\'t like the applications in Gnome so GTK+ must be a crappy toolkit.\" Or, \"I\'ve seen KDE apps crash so Qt must be garbage.\"

Or my favorite, \"This one Java app I ran back in 1996 was slow and used a lot of memory so Java must be the worst language in the world, I\'m going to use VB instead.\"

By: stosss

stosss — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with dragonwisard. Just because mojavelinux apparently does not like Ant does not make it bad.

By: fableson

fableson — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

good or bad, ant is what the Android team chose to ship with the SDK.

And no, VB isn\'t an option for building Android apps, though I am sure some enterprising programmer will try to create the next best development environment for those who are afraid to learn Java. OK, confession, I haven\'t actually searched for VB/Android tools -- makes me uncomfortable just writing it...

By: jvoegele

jvoegele — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

For those that feel that Ant needs to die (or at least be buried alive by a more powerful system built on top of it): you can now use Gradle to build Android applications. I have released the first version of the Android plugin for Gradle. Features include:

* Compile, package, and install Android applications. (Including handling of Android resource files.)
* Sign application packages using the default debug key, or with a release key for publication to Android Market.
* Incorporation of ProGuard to ensure that applications have minimal memory footprint.
* Create Android applications in Scala (and possibly Groovy or Clojure).

Full details at http://wiki.github.com/jvoegele/gradle-android-plugin/