[aerogear-dev] Android AAR Project format

[Summers Pittman]

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