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Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

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Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#61

Post by rkalla »

So... this is tender ground to be treading (holy wars).

I am a strong believer in your tool feeling good to you; it is the environment you create in. The better it feels, the faster and more cohesively you will work (within reason).

That being said, I'm comparing Eclipse+ADT to IntelliJ. I have no opinions on alternative home-brew solutions that are a combination of editors and command line.

For Android development, you'll want the following things:

- Strong Java editor support - Strong Android UI support - Strong debugger support - Strong deployment/emulator integration - Support for whatever Android version you are targetting.

The two IDEs in all those areas are damn near similar, except...

ADT 12 just added a slew of nice, Android-specific context-sensitive content assists that are really damn nice.

In addition, ADT 12 jumped the visual layout designer forward in a big way with accurate component rendering in preview as well as support for custom components[1].

I think something worth considering is that Android support is a feature, among 100 other, that the core IntelliJ team develops, support and extends.

ADT is the official, Google-driven effort to develop and expand their Android tooling on the Eclipse platform. The ADT team isn't distracted by things like autocomplete support, classpath scanning, project formats, etc... all they do is develop Android tooling directly ontop of Eclipse.

I would expect that the ADT tools continue to be more robust and outpace competitor implementations.

I would also point out that the ADT team has some seriously fantastic developers on it; if you are the type to enjoy high level "new feature" overviews of IDEs, check out Tor Norbye and Xavier Ducrohet's presentation at Google I/O 2011 showing off a lot of the new features in ADT 12[2].

I realize up to now it has sounded like I'm an Eclipse fan, but I am just a "tools to get things done" fan.

[1] http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq05KqjXTvs

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#63

Post by CoffeeDregs »

danielpal wrote: post #26
Xuzz wrote: post #8

As someone who is interested in Android, but is currently being scared off by Eclipse, does anyone know any good resources for developing for Android in something that isn't $BLOATED_JAVA_IDE? I tried vim, but the command-line builds were horribly slow, and almost all documentation and tutorials I found expected me to be using Eclipse.

Yes command-line build/deploy is horrible, the way to use vim is: - Write code in VIM - Build everything on Eclipse. Basically keep eclipse open only to build, and deploy to the smartphone. Everything else, do it in vim.

Funny, that's exactly what I do. Eclipse for building and debugging; Vim for coding. It's a pretty happy combination especially considering that the switch between perspectives is, for me, much more disorienting than the switching between two applications [I feel lame saying this, but the perspective change is really disorienting for me...].

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#64

Post by jinushaun »

After reading all the comments, going to have to check out IntelliJ. The thing I hate most about Android development is having to use Eclipse. Most of the time, I just end up coding in TextMate and only use Eclipse for building and debugging. I just hate how Eclipse feels and it's also slow.

Eclipse also sucks for Flash development, which is why I prefer FlashDevelop on Windows. It's just so much faster, and makes coding fun. Running FlashDevelop inside a VM is preferred over running FlashBuilder/Eclipse natively on the Mac.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#66

Post by walexander »

rreeves wrote: post #39

Emacs for me. Here's my setup: Emacs, DDMS + JSwat, and ant to build. I have emacs and a terminal open at all times. To build I switch over to the terminal and use ant. Sometimes I'll write a shell script to build+install+run on a phone. For directory navigation: nav - http://code.google.com/p/emacs-nav/ For code completion: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JavaCompletion Building on the command line is simple. Type an…

Emacs here, too. high five

My setup is essentially Emacs, DDMS and cscope/find/grep/etc.

I always find Eclipse to be too heavy. I don't do much actual UI coding though (I'm a platform guy), or I might consider it. The ADT UI tools seem to be very powerful and convenient.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#68

Post by gcb »

angryasian wrote: post #52
Xuzz wrote: post #8

As someone who is interested in Android, but is currently being scared off by Eclipse, does anyone know any good resources for developing for Android in something that isn't $BLOATED_JAVA_IDE? I tried vim, but the command-line builds were horribly slow, and almost all documentation and tutorials I found expected me to be using Eclipse.

are people complaining about eclipse because it starts up slow ? After initial startup, what are the issues that cause this person to be scared of using an IDE ?

ide does stuff i don't understand.

i read the "other ide" page on androids docs and understood all the build process.

if i used eclipse, all i would know is how to hunt down menus filled under nonsense names...

painfully typed on a mobile

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#69

Post by gcb »

brettnak wrote: post #24
Xuzz wrote: post #8

As someone who is interested in Android, but is currently being scared off by Eclipse, does anyone know any good resources for developing for Android in something that isn't $BLOATED_JAVA_IDE? I tried vim, but the command-line builds were horribly slow, and almost all documentation and tutorials I found expected me to be using Eclipse.

I too, would definitely recommend sticking with eclipse for now. When you really understand all the different steps of the build you could switch to emacs/vim + cli tools, but since it's pretty undocumented there's no reason not to stick with eclipse and do some work while you're figuring it all out.

open a default project in eclipse and just compile.

do all that the docs tell you that the ide is doing ioutside of it and compile.

i did the test. eclipse version had 30 extra kb i could never explain.

Re: Poll: Android developers, what IDE do you use?

#70

Post by shareme »

angryasian wrote: post #52
Xuzz wrote: post #8

As someone who is interested in Android, but is currently being scared off by Eclipse, does anyone know any good resources for developing for Android in something that isn't $BLOATED_JAVA_IDE? I tried vim, but the command-line builds were horribly slow, and almost all documentation and tutorials I found expected me to be using Eclipse.

are people complaining about eclipse because it starts up slow ? After initial startup, what are the issues that cause this person to be scared of using an IDE ?

people claim that Eclipse IDE is slow.. I run Eclipse IDE on Ubuntu under wmware VM on a 32 bit MS Vista 2.4GHZ AMD dual core cpu machine..and yet my eclipse start times beat theirs..part of java development is knowing how to tune VM settings..some just frankly do not know how..
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