7 ms·

Also interesting is that the Eclipse based ADT is no longer being maintained. Guess there's no choice but to migrate. http://developer.android.com/sdk/installin

by 0x0 12y ago

Also interesting is that the Eclipse based ADT is no longer being maintained. Guess there's no choice but to migrate. http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/migrate.html http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/migrate.html

krschultz 12y ago
It's for the best. Android Studio today is far better than Eclipse+ADT ever was. Maintaining two entire toolsets would be wasteful. Clearly Google decided it was easier to build the tools they wanted on top of IntelliJ than on top of Eclipse, even accounting for having to start over. That speaks volumes about the two platforms. For a time Android Studio was unstable and not feature complete[1], there were valid reasons to stay with Eclipse. These days the only people that aren't happy about it are those that prefer Eclipse to IntelliJ. That certainly is a valid opinion, but there were people that preferred IntelliJ to Eclipse the first time around. You can never please everyone. [1] Yes, I know NDK support isn't yet in Android Studio, it is coming.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  It's still very unfortunate, the developer community is about split between Eclipse and IDEA: forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption. They have enough resources to maintain both ADT and Android Studio, it's a very surprising move.
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    " forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption." I think it already did that before, didn't it? The shoe's just on the other foot now.
  - krschultz 12y ago
    The writing has been on the wall for a long time. At this point most of the full time developers that work on Android are using Android Studio. I personally have been using it for ~18 months as my daily driver IDE. About 9 months ago I asked a meetup audience of about ~150 people how many were using Studio and the hands showed about 50%. I imagine it is far higher than 50% today. The best developers I know are debating between Maven+IntelliJ and Gradle+Android Studio. If this turns off a handful of people that are tangentially attached to Android development, so be it. The people pushing the boundaries of writing apps have switched already. I know some people personally are more familiar with Eclipse than IntelliJ. I was one of those people. There are lots of training resources for people going from Eclipse to IntelliJ, it is a well tread path. Just give it a try.
  - Aldo_MX 12y ago
    > forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption. I know of a platform that forces developers to learn how to use their IDE, their Operating System, their Hardware, and recently their new language, and their adoption hasn't slowed down...
    - stevebot 12y ago
      heh I actually know of two platform's if you consider new windows phone.
      - Aldo_MX 12y ago
        Nope, Windows Phone (fortunately) doesn't force you to use Microsoft Hardware (yet).
        aceperry 12y ago
        Pardon me? I wasn't aware of any other platforms that you can use to develop for windows phone.
        jacalata 12y ago
        The windows platform runs on third party hardware, including Macs.
        aceperry 12y ago
        I know that you can run Windows on a mac, but you can't use OSX to develop for Windows.
        Aldo_MX 12y ago
        You can't even install OSX on something without an Apple logo (well, in theory you can but you shouldn't because insert legalese and threats here). In the case of Apple their closeness is not hurting them, and definitely not decreasing their adoption. In the case of Microsoft... well, they still need to convince people to take Windows Phone seriously, so their closeness only helps to hurt them.
  - izacus 12y ago
    Honestly, if you have problems getting used to an IDE, you'll have a huge problem developing for Android anyway - it's a platform that's significantly different than any out there and learning the IDE is such a minor thing that developer hung up on that probably shouldn't be developing Android apps. Also, you're not "forced" into anything - any Gradle compatible Java IDE will load and compile AS projects without a hitch (sadly, Eclipse Gradle support is really bad, hence the switch od IntelliJ platform).
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Eclipse support of any build tool is quite bad, since they are always seen as external tools (looking at you M2E). I rather like the approach taken by Netbeans where they refactored the IDE to use build tools as the project format, with known targets mapped to IDE actions. Same approach taken by Visual Studio as well. Cannot say much about Android Studio, because lack of C++ editing/linting/refactoring/debugging and NDK support keeps me on Eclipse.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  NDK user. Staying with Eclipse for the time being.
  - barclay 12y ago
    Yeah. This is a sticking point for us, also. There's ways around it, but it's still pretty broken. :(
pjmlp 12y ago
Those of us doing C++ on Android still cannot.
- emp 12y ago
  Jetbrains is working on a C/C++ IDE (CLion), so I would expect this functionality to flow over. I spend most of my time in AppCode and IntelliJ, and core functions from other projects flows between their IDEs regularly.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    I just wished that we (NDK users) would be considered for a 1.0 release, but given how the NDK tools are, it isn't a surprise.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  To be honest, I use my favorite IDE with C++ projects, and use eclipse exclusively to build the APK file.
  - warcher 12y ago
    I would be extremely interested in how you approach that-- specifically with respect to the debugger. I'm using the canonical eclilpse/cdt/gdb stack and it is nothing short of torture compared to any modern IDE. I mean, eclipse is a broken hellscape of failed promises on its own, but gdb is.... words fail me. Truly. AND I KNOW HOW TO USE GDB PRETTY WELL.
    - Aldo_MX 12y ago
      The applications we build are cross-platform games, and the Android-specific code is reduced to the bare minimum and abstracted behind a framework. The development and debugging is done with the desktop version of the game. We avoid using Eclipse & friends unless we manage to break something at the Android side, which fortunately almost never happens. We found this approach to be the most productive and less frustrating for our team.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Also interesting is that the Eclipse based ADT is no longer being maintained. It was announced quite a while ago that ADT was being abandoned and that Android Studio would replace it when available.
sehugg 12y ago
Yes, Eclipse is pretty much busted now due to Google Play packages using .aar (you have to just copy the .jars into your Eclipse project now) and Android Studio is an uphill battle if you are already using Gradle, since it uses a newer version that probably wasn't compatible with your third-party plugins.

by 0x0 12y ago

krschultz 12y ago

It's for the best. Android Studio today is far better than Eclipse+ADT ever was. Maintaining two entire toolsets would be wasteful. Clearly Google decided it was easier to build the tools they wanted on top of IntelliJ than on top of Eclipse, even accounting for having to start over. That speaks volumes about the two platforms. For a time Android Studio was unstable and not feature complete[1], there were valid reasons to stay with Eclipse. These days the only people that aren't happy about it are those that prefer Eclipse to IntelliJ. That certainly is a valid opinion, but there were people that preferred IntelliJ to Eclipse the first time around. You can never please everyone. [1] Yes, I know NDK support isn't yet in Android Studio, it is coming.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
It's still very unfortunate, the developer community is about split between Eclipse and IDEA: forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption. They have enough resources to maintain both ADT and Android Studio, it's a very surprising move.
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  " forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption." I think it already did that before, didn't it? The shoe's just on the other foot now.
- krschultz 12y ago
  The writing has been on the wall for a long time. At this point most of the full time developers that work on Android are using Android Studio. I personally have been using it for ~18 months as my daily driver IDE. About 9 months ago I asked a meetup audience of about ~150 people how many were using Studio and the hands showed about 50%. I imagine it is far higher than 50% today. The best developers I know are debating between Maven+IntelliJ and Gradle+Android Studio. If this turns off a handful of people that are tangentially attached to Android development, so be it. The people pushing the boundaries of writing apps have switched already. I know some people personally are more familiar with Eclipse than IntelliJ. I was one of those people. There are lots of training resources for people going from Eclipse to IntelliJ, it is a well tread path. Just give it a try.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  > forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption. I know of a platform that forces developers to learn how to use their IDE, their Operating System, their Hardware, and recently their new language, and their adoption hasn't slowed down...
  - stevebot 12y ago
    heh I actually know of two platform's if you consider new windows phone.
    - Aldo_MX 12y ago
      Nope, Windows Phone (fortunately) doesn't force you to use Microsoft Hardware (yet).
      - aceperry 12y ago
        Pardon me? I wasn't aware of any other platforms that you can use to develop for windows phone.
        jacalata 12y ago
        The windows platform runs on third party hardware, including Macs.
        aceperry 12y ago
        I know that you can run Windows on a mac, but you can't use OSX to develop for Windows.
        Aldo_MX 12y ago
        You can't even install OSX on something without an Apple logo (well, in theory you can but you shouldn't because insert legalese and threats here). In the case of Apple their closeness is not hurting them, and definitely not decreasing their adoption. In the case of Microsoft... well, they still need to convince people to take Windows Phone seriously, so their closeness only helps to hurt them.
- izacus 12y ago
  Honestly, if you have problems getting used to an IDE, you'll have a huge problem developing for Android anyway - it's a platform that's significantly different than any out there and learning the IDE is such a minor thing that developer hung up on that probably shouldn't be developing Android apps. Also, you're not "forced" into anything - any Gradle compatible Java IDE will load and compile AS projects without a hitch (sadly, Eclipse Gradle support is really bad, hence the switch od IntelliJ platform).
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Eclipse support of any build tool is quite bad, since they are always seen as external tools (looking at you M2E). I rather like the approach taken by Netbeans where they refactored the IDE to use build tools as the project format, with known targets mapped to IDE actions. Same approach taken by Visual Studio as well. Cannot say much about Android Studio, because lack of C++ editing/linting/refactoring/debugging and NDK support keeps me on Eclipse.
pjmlp 12y ago
NDK user. Staying with Eclipse for the time being.
- barclay 12y ago
  Yeah. This is a sticking point for us, also. There's ways around it, but it's still pretty broken. :(

pjmlp 12y ago

Those of us doing C++ on Android still cannot.

emp 12y ago
Jetbrains is working on a C/C++ IDE (CLion), so I would expect this functionality to flow over. I spend most of my time in AppCode and IntelliJ, and core functions from other projects flows between their IDEs regularly.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  I just wished that we (NDK users) would be considered for a 1.0 release, but given how the NDK tools are, it isn't a surprise.
Aldo_MX 12y ago
To be honest, I use my favorite IDE with C++ projects, and use eclipse exclusively to build the APK file.
- warcher 12y ago
  I would be extremely interested in how you approach that-- specifically with respect to the debugger. I'm using the canonical eclilpse/cdt/gdb stack and it is nothing short of torture compared to any modern IDE. I mean, eclipse is a broken hellscape of failed promises on its own, but gdb is.... words fail me. Truly. AND I KNOW HOW TO USE GDB PRETTY WELL.
  - Aldo_MX 12y ago
    The applications we build are cross-platform games, and the Android-specific code is reduced to the bare minimum and abstracted behind a framework. The development and debugging is done with the desktop version of the game. We avoid using Eclipse & friends unless we manage to break something at the Android side, which fortunately almost never happens. We found this approach to be the most productive and less frustrating for our team.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Also interesting is that the Eclipse based ADT is no longer being maintained. It was announced quite a while ago that ADT was being abandoned and that Android Studio would replace it when available.

sehugg 12y ago

Yes, Eclipse is pretty much busted now due to Google Play packages using .aar (you have to just copy the .jars into your Eclipse project now) and Android Studio is an uphill battle if you are already using Gradle, since it uses a newer version that probably wasn't compatible with your third-party plugins.