Y'all,

pilhuhn asked on Twitter if we were planning to support the new aar
package format in AeroGear's Android library.  Matzew suggested to take
it to the mailing list so I will run with it for now.

First an introduction.  Aar is Google's new binary package format for
Android libraries.  It is what their Gradle plugin looks for when it
fetches libraries.  For those of you who havn't experienced the joy of
using Android Library Projects with Android Application projects this
fixes a whole host of maintainability and usability problems.  Matzew
can probably explain the n00b experience better, but you should be
fluent in angry, angry German.

Now for the challenges.  We use Maven to build AGDroid and the
maven-android-plugin does not yet support aar.  

Also in some Googling
last week I could find 0 documentation for the file format.  Right now
the only way to make an aar build is to export an Eclipse Android
project and import it into Android Studio and let it build the aar for
you.  This can then be packaged into maven central but is really labor
intensive.

Also the only thing which supports using aar is Android Studio /
Google's Gradle build stuff.  Other than being on the cutting cutting
edge (and having a nice project feather in our cap) I don't really see
what this gets us right now.

With that said I would like to put energy toward this.

For now I propose we start building an aar as part of the release process.
Eventually I would like to lend a hand to the android-maven-plugin
project so they can export aars.
Right now I do NOT think we should look at porting the AGDroid source
project from maven to Android Studio.

Thoughts?

Summers
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