subject: Android Developmentresources [print this page] The process of Android application development and Android website development is some what daunting for those who are getting started with. There are so many devices, websites and tools and options available. It is difficult to know where to start so in this article I have pointed out the basic software you need and some other tools required for the Android development.
Android Applications
There are two types of Android applications, one is native application (applications which take advantage of the native functionality provided by specific Android devices) and another is web application (applications which may appear to be normal Android apps, but are actually web-based apps created with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript). You have seen that each application has different requirements so we will discuss only Android native apps development in this article.
Android native application development requires knowledge of Java programming language because Android is based on Java so you need to be proficient in Java first. If you are not ready to do hard work to learn Java then you has to use App Inventors described below which dont require serious programming knowledge.
Software and Hardware Requirements
You should have the latest hardware system which allows following operating system to run on.
Windows XP (32-bit), Vista (32- or 64-bit), or Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit)
Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (x86 only)
Linux (Linux Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Lucid Lynx definitely work, others may vary)
If you use proprietary software like Windows or Mac you should use licensed version because there are many problems with pirated copies.
First of all you need to create development environment, Android SDK include the support for the Eclipse IDE when it has the Eclipse JDT plug-in installed. Moreover, you need to install Java Development Kit on your machine because just have Java runtime Engine installed is not enough. There are chances that you may not comfortable with Eclipse IDE so you may use the Apache Ant. 1.6.5 IDE instead which also has support of all three operating systems.
As far as disk space is concern you have to spare enough disk space for Eclipse or Apache Ant installations. Apart from these you have to spare some room for installation of other tools and saving of tutorials. There is Android SDK tools come with each version of SDKs, platform tools, each Android platform, USB drives, sample apps, SDK add-ons and documentations. These all of the above tools need at least 750 MB of free disk space.
