Question

I feel as though I’m trying to learn android programming in the middle of a fireworks display during a rodeo. All the fancy IDE stuff recommended by all the books I seem to find is just monumentally distracting from discovering what I really and truly need just to develop an android app.

Can anyone point me at documentation for the minimal set of the tools needed to actually build an app? I feel like if I could understand what the heck was actually going on, I’d be better able to use the fancy IDE.

Answer 1

Primitive? So, not Eclipse, and also not ant. You can use aapt, javac, dx, apkbuilder, and signer directly. Or more-or-less directly; you’re still a programmer, you have ways of dealing with repetition.

I do some on-device app development with Terminal IDE. This is one my build scripts (named ‘make’):

P=me/rapacity/stitch

rm src/$P/R.java
mkdir -m 770 -p dist || exit
mkdir -m 770 -p build/classes || exit
mkdir -m 770 -p tmp || exit

./index.perl

aapt p -f -M AndroidManifest.xml -F build/resources.res \
     -I ~/sdk/3.2/android.jar -S res/ -J src/$P || exit

cd src
for F in \
    SelectActivity.java Tilesets.java \
        StitchActivity.java \
        TilesetView.java \
; do
  if test $P/$F -nt ../build/classes/$P/$(dirname $F)/$(basename $F .java).class; then
    echo Building $P/$F
    REBUILD=1
    javac -d ../build/classes $P/$F 2> ../tmp/javac.out
    ../redcat ../tmp/javac.out
    grep error ../tmp/javac.out && exit
  fi
done
cd ..

if [ ! -z $REBUILD ]; then
  set -x
  ( cd src; javac -d ../build/classes $P/R.java )
  ( cd build/classes; dx --dex --verbose --no-strict --output=../core.dex me ) ||  # 'me' as in me.rapacity.

  apkbuilder dist/core.apk -u -z build/resources.res -f build/core.dex || exit
  signer dist/core.apk core-debug.apk
else
  echo +++ No need to rebuild .apk
fi

in which some lengths are gone to to avoid recompilation and to promptly exit after an error. Very little of that needs to be edited per-project.