I’ve started work on an Android App that will work with Google Docs.
UPDATE 12/9: From the information I’ve come across, it seems Google Docs is not supported by this library. The question is probably still relevant in general, but seem not specifically for this project as I can’t use the library anyway.
I was doing some research and come across the Google APIs Client Library for Java
I decided to start with the tasks-android-sample to begin learning how to utilize this library.
I followed these instructions
I successfully installed Mercurial and Maven and already had Java 7 installed.
I was able to execute these commands
cd [someDirectory]
hg clone https://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client.samples/ google-api-java-client-samples
cd google-api-java-client-samples/shared/shared-sample-android
[editor] src/main/java/com/google/api/services/samples/shared/android/ClientCredentials.java
mvn source:jar install
I was also successful in setting up the Mercurial plugin (not sure what this did for me — I believe the hg command above is the only time Mercurial was involved) and Maven plugin
Finally, I was able to imported the tasks-android-sample, compile it, run it on the emulator and I was able to see the tasks I created on my google account.
I then repeated the process, except this time I simply imported sample’s source code and the required JARs into a new Android project and added the ClientCredentials.java manually to the project (So I could specify my Google API Key).
I was also able to compile and run this project and it operated as expected.
My questions in all this is which method is preferred? Or is it a personal choice? Are there benefits to using Maven that I’m not realizing at this time?
Maven helps you download proper dependency libraries for the project, and can reduce the burden of find and download proper libraries.
It’s fine to just put dependency libs in your code base. It’s a personal choice.