We have been doing quite a bit of Android development over the last year and a half at Pivotal Labs. Over time we have compiled a set of go-to tools, and libraries, and configuration settings that help make our development process as productive as possible. We are excited to publish two open source projects, each with the goal of helping new Android development projects hit the ground running: Android IntelliJ Starter and Android CI.
Android IntelliJ Starter
Android IntelliJ Starter (github project here) is a “template” IntelliJ 10.5 project created to bootstrap Android development in IntelliJ. Our goal: start test-driving your new Android project within minutes, not hours (or days) using the Robolectric framework for testing and Robojuice framework for dependency-injection. In addition to the starter application and unit tests many other supporting libraries are provided, including C2DM push notification libraries with a stubbed-out, documented C2DM implementation class.
Android IntelliJ Starter represents hard earned configuration knowledge as well: getting all these tools to work seamlessly in IntelliJ and on the command line using ant is no small feat. We’ve even provided instructions on how to remove the extra tools and libraries — configuration by deletion.
Android CI
Android CI (github project here) is intended to bootstrap Android continuous integration using Jenkins-CI (formerly Hudson). This project is a stripped-down version of Jenkins’ configuration directory, which is ~/.jenkins by default.
Android CI ships with one preconfigured job: running tests and building .apks for Android IntelliJ Starter. If your project starts as a clone or fork of Android IntelliJ Starter then Android CI’s configuration will work well for you with only a few simple changes.
Help Us Improve
At Pivotal Labs we are committed to making Android development as productive as possible. We will add more functionality to both projects over time and we encourage others to fork, enhance, send us pull requests, and to use the Issues tab on each Github project’s page to notify us of problems so we can fix them promptly.
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