Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
2
First Steps with the
Android SDK
The Android SDK provides a set of tools that enables you to create applications in a short
amount of time. This chapter will guide you through the process of building a simple Android
application with the SDK tools. This involves the following steps:
1.
Setting up the development environment.
2.
Creating a new project in Eclipse and writing your code.
3.
Running the application on the emulator or on a device.
4.
Debugging and profiling the application.
We'll conclude this chapter by looking into useful third-party tools. Let's start with setting up the
development environment.
Setting Up the Development Environment
The Android SDK is flexible, and it integrates well with several development environments.
Purists might choose to go hard core with command-line tools. We want things to be a little bit
more comfortable, though, so we'll go for the simpler, more visual route using an IDE (integrated
development environment).
Here's the list of software you'll need to download and install in the given order:
1.
The Java Development Kit (JDK), version 5 or 6. We suggest using 6.
At the time of writing, JDK 7 is problematic in connection with Android
development. One has to instruct the compiler to compile for Java 6.
2.
The Android Software Development Kit (Android SDK).
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