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Comment by bananas | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a lot of J2ME stuff a few years ago and you're spot on. I spent two weeks doing Java 8 bits with NetBeans which was really nice and spent the last two evenings writing my first Android app and what a complete mess it is. Plus the Android tooling is horrible to get working reliably - most problems being solved by "restart eclipse".

Late edit: perhaps Oracle should make a phone ;)

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> Plus the Android tooling is horrible to get working reliably - most problems being solved by "restart eclipse"

Try Intellij IDEA / Android Studio. I find them quite reliable.

Intellij IDEA, yes.

Android Studio seems to still have performance issues with Gradle on Windows, specially when indexing stuff.

Agreed. I prefer IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to Android Studio because I like using the same IDE for Android and Java development.

> Late edit: perhaps Oracle should make a phone ;)

They did an open spec tablet with a raspberry pi tough.

https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/OpenJFX/DukePad

Chuck a GSM module in it and done :)

> "restart eclipse"

Eclipse

/shudder

After this week, yep!

I also did some J2ME stuff back in 2003, most with Sharp and Nokia devices.

I read somewhere that some in the Android team are C converts doing their first Java gig.

Have you seen how broken are the generated Renderscript bindings? They don't have anything to do with Java conventions and feel completely out of place.

Haven't looked at render script yet. Still scratching head on the layout engine stuff and View infrastructure. It's fugly. I usually write C#+WPF and C++/Qt and HTML/Java EE and all of those are massively nicer to deal with.

If you are two days in and still getting around how Views and layout works I wouldn't call it a mess yet. You are still pretty early into it. Its not messy its just new to you.

From my experience once you get past the initial hump of learning their basic APIs and conventions its a very easy to work with platform. Maybe I am biased because I spend a lot of time with it. I also really like the tooling. How is it acting unstable for you?

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