[aerogear-dev] Android Studio / Gradle support

[Marc Sluiter]

Thanks for your feedback. Some comments inline.

Am 02.04.2014 14:58, schrieb Summers Pittman:
> Congrats!  I've given some feed back inline with your post.
>
> On 04/01/2014 05:00 PM, Marc Sluiter wrote:
>> (next try, sorry again)
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> some time ago there was already a discussion about using Android Studio / Gradle
>> [1], but as far as I can see nothing happened afterwards.
> Well lots of stuff happened.  We ended up deciding to do it, and ran
> into the Robolectric problems you described.  Also we were still going
> to have to maintain a maven build to get apk libs working and integrate
> with our various build systems.  Then the maven-android-plugin project
> added aar support so we went with that instead.

Ok, good point.
It seems to be possible to create apklibs with Gradle too: 
https://plus.google.com/+ChristopherBroadfoot/posts/7uyipf8DTau. I think 
I will give it a try in my setup the next days.

>>
>> So I was curious if I can get the cookbook application running with Android's
>> new build system, and want to share what I found out so far:
>>
>> My first approach was to migrate the cookbook first, and using the library as
>> dependency only. But that didn't work out, because the Androd dependencies in
>> the pom.xml of the lib could not be found. I really didn't want to install them
>> with the maven-android-sdk-deployer, because that's not needed anymore with the
>> new build system, it accesses directly the installed Android SDK.
>>
>> So I migrated the lib first. The first issue was: how do I get the aar into my
>> local maven repository? Solution: the Gradle Android Maven plugin [2]. After
>> some configuration I could install the lib into my local maven repo with
>> "gradlew clean install". Nice.
> It is very nice.  mvn clean install should install an aar into your
> local repository as well however.  If it didn't do that can you file a JIRA?

I did not even try it with maven and took directly the 
migration-to-gradle approach. But I can test that, too.

>>
>> Then I looked how I can run the Robolectric tests in the lib. That seems to be a
>> problem, because the Android Gradle plugin team seems to be focused on running
>> tests in AVDs or on real devices only [3]. Then I found another Gradle plugin to
>> the rescue... at least I thought: the Robolectric team itself maintains the
>> Gradle Android Unit Testing plugin [4], which should run JUnit and Robolectric
>> tests, but unfortunatly it was broken by the latest Android Gradle plugin
>> update... [5]. So I prepared running the tests, but had to comment out the
>> plugin for the moment.
>>
>> So back to the cookbook: here I had to use a workaround now for accessing my
>> local maven repo, because the official and easy way is broken in Gradle itself
>> atm [6]. But with the workaround I could run the cookbook app on my device with
>> "gradle clean installDebug"... finally  (And with the OpenShift Push Server it
>> was easy to test the push functionality, great!)
> Huzzah!
>>
>> So my resume of this adventure:
>> before that I liked Android Studio very much, I used it for some little private
>> fun apps already, and had only few problems. It has features (e.g. product
>> flavors) which were more difficult to handle with maven. But I tested only by
>> deploying and using the apps on my own devices (shame on me, I know...), so
>> missing JUnit/Robolectric support was not an issue for me. And my library
>> project was part of the app's project (works nice with Gradle!), so no local
>> maven issues.
>> But now I think that there is still some work to do with Android Studio and the
>> Android Gradle plugin. Some gaps can be filled with 3rd party plugins, but the
>> chance that they get broken by new versions of the build system is not low,
>> development is very fast.
> Yeah.  The fast moving target was a downer for us as well.
>>
>> One point I forgot: I did not have a look into the Travis stuff, because I don't
>> know it yet.
>>
>> If you are interested in my results, see here:
>>
>> https://github.com/slintes/aerogear-android/tree/gradle
>> https://github.com/slintes/aerogear-android-cookbook/tree/gradle
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Marc
> Thanks!

You're welcome

>>
>>
>> [1]
>> http://aerogear-dev.1069024.n5.nabble.com/aerogear-dev-Android-Google-s-Gradle-build-tool-and-AAR-td4508.html
>> [2] https://github.com/dcendents/android-maven-plugin
>> [3] http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/user-guide#TOC-Testing
>> [4] https://github.com/robolectric/gradle-android-test-plugin
>> [5] https://github.com/robolectric/gradle-android-test-plugin/issues/8
>> [6] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=63908
>>
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