Mororola's new free Android IDE | Hacker News Reader

Mororola's new free Android IDE

developer.motorola.com

36 pointsnailer16 comments

I believe the title should be fixed to read "Motorola's", not "Mororola's".

I just assumed Scooby Doo typed the title.

The good: Obviously the more Ides the better and displays how open Android is.

The bad: Is this the beginning of the fragmentation in the Android space? Probably not...

Android seems like a nice guy and all, but could we please get a C++-environment. Current mobile market is way too fragmented imho, iPhones have their ObjC, Nokia has Symbian C++, and now Android has its Java. Nearly impossible to develop anything which would run on all three mentioned easily.

I'm sorry for not researching properly before posting. Android seems to have native devkit too.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-a...

The NDK is new, and not that powerful. It's nice if you have some big chunk of legacy C++ you want running underneath an Android app, but you have no access to most of the internals that are also written in C++ (radio, media, hardware, graphics, etc).

You're still going to have to code in Java and talk to the native code through the JNI. You can also download the open source tree and work with the entire native layer, but that's undocumented territory.

There's a much larger cognitive shift for a C++ developer in simply using a different framework than coding in Java. I don't think much is gained or lost in things being in one language or the other so long as the APIs are completely different.

Not to mention that 105% of the pain of coding for series 60 Nokia devices is the (extensive, sprawling, frequently redundant) library rather than the core language.

(Then you get to pick more pain to go on top, such as which versions of network connection management are you going to support?)

Ironically, there appears to be no version of this for any free, open-source OS, such as Linux, for building apps for the free, open-source Android platform.

How is this different from eclipse+ADT?

It comes pre-packaged and set up, with integration for the market (of questionable value) and Motorola emulators (fantastic - the more test targets the better).

Downloading Eclipse+ADT separately wasn't too hard last time I did it, but it's always nice to have steps removed. Most handset/java (Android, RIM, J2ME) developers I know have several Eclipse installations on their machine anyway to stop plugin conflicts so having one more is no big deal.

(EDIT: They have also removed Linux support, which seems to be an odd decision to say the least.)

They also have code snippets and Application Creation wizards. I think the later will be useful what with the api still being unstable(pmi pkg disappearing between 1.0 to 1.5 etc).

The one from Motorola does not run on Linux.

Not this week anyway - http://ow.ly/ibcK.

Oh, well then I can be optimistic. Thanks.

It is eclipse.

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