I’m building an Android application (as an Eclipse project) that needs to access a web service. We will be sending the data from the service as JSON serialized classes, so we want to share some of the classes between the Android application and the server application. We are currently thinking that the way we need to do this is to structure our Git repository with 3 folders. One for the client, one for the server, and one for the shared library.
But at that point we couldn’t figure out how to create the shared code. It looks like we can put all the .java files into a folder and then create a relative link to that folder from the other projects, but is that a good way to go about this?
The other possibility we found was to create another project in Eclipse and then include the library project in the client project. However we ran into a problem here. How can we make the library usable by both the server and Android? If I create a new Java project in Eclipse, I must select a JRE to build for, but Dalvik isn’t an option, and even if it was how could I use the library with a desktop VM if the library was compiled for Dalvik?
I would use 3 projects:
and include shared as a project dependency in both server and client. If you use ant you’d drop the shared.jar in both server/lib and client/lib every time it’s changed, and if you use maven it’s a dependency (possibly with Ant + Ivy it’s also a dependency). Consider Nexus as a repository location in that case.