Question

I’m writing a bound Service class for android. In addition, I thought I’d provide a client class that would wrap all the Handler/Messenger/Bundle stuff into an easy to use API. When I build this project, I want it to build the Service into an .apk and the client class into a .jar file that I can use in other projects. Is that possible? I’d prefer to do it in a way that would work with Eclipse or Ant.

Answer 1

You want to create a Shared Library. From the docs:

You can also designate an Android project as a library project, which allows it to be shared with other projects that depend on it. Once an Android project is designated as a library project, it cannot be installed onto a device.

There’s a detailed how-to on the page, but the short version is that once you have separate projects for the app and the library, right click on the library’s project, go to Properties > Android, and select the “Is Library” checkbox.

To reference it, from the application’s project, go to Properties > Android, and in the library section, click “Add” and choose your library.