How to Setup Android Development Environment? Part 2 (Windows)

CONTINUE OF PART 1.

Step 3: Installing Eclipse

Eclipse comes in a couple of different flavors. For Android developers, I suggest using Eclipse for Java Developers version 3.6, Like the Android SDK, Eclipse comes in the form of a ZIP or tar gzip package. Simply extract it to a folder of your choice. Once it’s uncompressed, you can create a nice little shortcut on your desktop to the eclipse executable in the root directory of your Eclipse installation. The first time you start Eclipse, you will be prompted to specify a workspace directory. 

Figure 2. Choosing a workspace

A workspace is Eclipse’s notion of a folder containing a set of projects. Whether you use a single workspace for all your projects or multiple workspaces that group just a few projects is completely up to you. The sample projects accompanying this book are all organized in a single workspace, which you could specify in this dialog. For now, we’ll simply create an empty workspace somewhere.

Eclipse will then greet us with a welcome screen, which we can safely ignore and close. This will leave us with the default Eclipse Java perspective. We’ll get to know Eclipse a little better in a later section. For now it suffices to have it running.

Step 4: Installing the ADT Eclipse Plug-In

The last piece in our setup puzzle is installing the ADT Eclipse plug-in. Eclipse is based on a plug-in architecture that is used to extend its capabilities by third-party plug-ins. The ADT plug-in marries the tools found in the Android SDK with the powers of Eclipse. Given this combination, we can completely forget about invoking all the command-line

Android SDK tools; the ADT plug-in integrates them transparently into our Eclipse workflow.

Installing plug-ins for Eclipse can be done either manually, by dropping the contents of a plug-in ZIP file into the plug-ins folder of Eclipse, or via the Eclipse plug-in manager integrated with Eclipse. Here we’ll choose the second route.

1. To install a new plug-in, go to Help > Install New Software..., which will open the installation dialog. In this dialog you can choose from which source to install what plug-in. First, you have to add the plug-in repository from which the ADT plug-in is fetched. Click the Add button, and you will be presented with the dialog depicted in Figure 3.

2. In the first text field, you can enter the name of the repository; something like “ADT repository” will do. The second text field specifies the URL of the repository. For the ADT plug-in, this field should be https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/. Note that this URL might be different for newer versions, so check the ADT plug-in site for an up-to-date link.

Figure 3. Adding a repository

3. After you’ve confirmed the dialog, you’ll be brought back to the installation dialog, which should now be fetching the list of available plug-ins in the repository. Check the Developer Tools check box and click the Next button.

4. Eclipse will now calculate all the necessary dependencies, and then present you a new dialog that lists all the plug-ins and dependencies that are going to be installed. Confirm that dialog with a click on the Next button.

5. Yet another dialog will pop up, prompting you to accept the licenses of each plug-in to be installed. You should of course accept those licenses, and finally initiate the installation with a click on the Finish button.

6. Finally, Eclipse will ask you whether it should restart to apply the changes. You can opt for a full restart or for applying the changes without a restart. To play it safe, choose Restart Now, which will restart Eclipse as expected.

After all this dialog madness, you’ll be presented with the same Eclipse window as before. The toolbar features a couple of new buttons specific to Android, which allow you to start the SDK and AVD manager directly from within Eclipse, as well as create new Android projects. Figure 4 shows these new shiny toolbar buttons.

Figure 4. ADT toolbar buttons

The first button on the left allows you to open the AVD and SDK Manager. The next button is a shortcut to creating a new Android project. The other two buttons will create a new unit test project or Android manifest file (functionality we won’t use in this book). As one last step in finishing the installation of the ADT plug-in, you have to tell the plugin where the Android SDK is located.

1. Open Window > Preferences, and select Android in the tree view in the upcoming dialog.

2. On the right side, click the Browse button to chose the root directory of your Android SDK installation.

3. Click the OK button to close the dialog, and you’ll finally able to create your first Android application.

Conclusion

This is how you set up development environment for Android Development. You can take a quick tour of Eclipse from this post for getting started with your development environment. Happy Sharing :)