Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2-4.
ADT toolbar buttons
The first two buttons on the left allow you to open the SDK Manager and the AVD Manager,
respectively. The button that looks like a check box lets you run Android lint, which checks your
project for potential bugs. The next button is the New Android App Project button, a shortcut to
create a new Android project. The rightmost two buttons, respectively, enable you to create a
new unit test project or Android manifest file (functionality that we won't use in this topic).
As one last step in finishing the installation of the ADT plug-in, you have to tell the plug-in where
the Android SDK is located:
1.
Open Window ➤ Preferences and select Android in the tree view in the
dialog that appears.
2.
On the right side, click the Browse button to choose the root directory of
your Android SDK installation.
3.
Click the OK button to close the dialog. Now you'll be able to create your
first Android application.
A Quick Tour of Eclipse
Eclipse is an open source IDE you can use to develop applications written in various
languages. Usually, Eclipse is used in connection with Java development. Given Eclipse's
plug-in architecture, many extensions have been created, so it is also possible to develop pure
C/C++, Scala, or Python projects as well. The possibilities are endless; even plug-ins to write
LaTeX projects exist, for example—something that only slightly resembles your usual code
development tasks.
An instance of Eclipse works with a workspace that holds one or more projects. Previously, we
defined a workspace at startup. All new projects you create will be stored in the workspace
directory, along with a configuration that defines the look of Eclipse when using the workspace,
among other things.
The user interface (UI) of Eclipse revolves around two concepts:
ï?®
view
, a single UI component such as a source code editor, an output
console, or a project explorer.
A
ï?®
perspective
, a set of specific views that you'll most likely need for a specific
development task, such as editing and browsing source code, debugging,
profiling, synchronizing with a version control repository, and so on.
A
Eclipse for Java Developers comes with several predefined perspectives. The ones in which
we are most interested are called Java and Debug. The Java perspective is the one shown in
Figure
2-5
. It features the Package Explorer view on the left side, a Source Code view in the
middle (it's empty, as we didn't open a source file yet), a Task List view to the right, an Outline
view, and a tabbed view that contains subviews called Problems view, Javadoc view, Declaration
view, and Console view.
