Google android

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Android

Not in agreement a very common misconception that Android is an OPERATING SYSTEM for the upcoming android phones, i would first like to clarify that android is more of a Software Stack, and not an operating system, as such. It was the brainchild of Open Handset Alliance, which is a group of companies and organizations, with google being one of the most prominent ones, who decided to invent an open source mobile platform, for developers to work on and design applications for. A major initiative taken by Google to promote Android was the launching of Android Developers Challenge, which met huge success, and saw participations from all over the world in large numbers, with about 50 of the contesting entries making it to the next level.L

Leaving the essential details and the list of all available APIs for another article, this article is meant to explain as to how to install the Android SDK and its Android Developers Tools(ADT) plugin for the devilishly famous Eclipse IDE for Java development.

Installing and Using Android SDK

The first releases of SDK were meant to be 'early-look' editions of what is now a beta version of the same SDK. This and the earlier versions of the development kit, were all found to be perfectly functional on Windows XP, Vista, Linux (Fedora, ubuntu etc.) as well as MAC OS X.

The 0.9 Beta version of Android SDK can be downloaded from this link. As mentioned above the downloads are available for windows, linux and mac osx.

The downloaded file would be in a compressed format, so extract to any location that is convenient to you. This folder essentially contains all the files, tools, sample codes, as well as essential tools like the emulator, adb, the debugger etc. If you wish to use the SDK as a stand-alone command prompt tool, add the path of /tools directory to your environment variables. However, the later part of this discussion would not require this, as we will be using Eclipse for developing our Android apps.

Now to the part where we set up our version of Eclipse to use the SDK for development. If you already dont have Eclipse IDE installed on your systems, you can download them from here. I use Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede edition, though the Europa version should work fine enough for our purpose. Once the package is downloaded, again extract it anywhere on your file system. A very good thing about Eclipse IDE downloads is that it doesn't require you to run any installer or to compile any source, on any platform. It directly gives you the executable file to run and use the IDE, as it is.

After installing Eclipse, the next step is to install the ADT plugin so that we can integrate our version of Android SDK to the IDE. For this open eclipse, go to help menu, and select Software Updates. In the Software Updates dialog, click on Add Site. In the url field enter https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/. This is the link to the google repositories containing the ADT plugins, development tools and Editors. Click OK. In the Available Software window, select Developer Tools and click Install. You should choose to install both Android Developer Tools and Android Editors. If the Android Editors give some resolution errors at later stages, just install the WST plugin for Eclipse as well, although, this wont be required in most of the cases. Click Finish. To complete the installation, you'll have to restart Eclipse.

We are still not done setting up the ADT plugin. We want the plugin to point to the directory where our SDK is installed, and used the tools therein. For this, open Eclipse and go to Window menu, select Preferences. There, under the Android subsection, change the path of the SDK to the path where you extracted the SDK folder to.

We are now done installing the Android SDK and its ADT plugin for Eclipse. To start learning development of apps on Android platform, make use of the Google's Official Android Documentations. Although, the documentation is pretty hefty and unorganized, this should be a nice place to get to know more about the platform. For more hands-on development, register and use the forums on Anddev. The tutorials here are pretty exhaustive and categorized into various levels of difficulty.

Please post your queries and comments on LUG forums.