I haven’t blogged for a long time, and I would have liked to be able to blog about my Gnome soc project, but unfortunately, I have other priorities. As part of my studies, I had to do some development for the android platform, and since the last summer, I can’t use other development environment than Vim, I decided to find a way of using it for my android project.

So here is the description of my Vim environment for android applications development. I use vim 7.2, the version distributed with Ubuntu 9.10, the Vjde plugin, terminator as a terminal (which by the way is a great terminal emulator!!) and then last android JDK in order to develop application for android2.0 (eclaire).

First I installed the SDK (there are a few bugs on the emulator installation due to this bug and an this ssl problem. I fallowed this guide to set the sdk. Then, I installed the Vjde plug-in which is a Vim plug-in to get a Java development environment in Vi, this plugin permit to add intelligent completion for methods calls as well as for imports (You only need to unzip this in you ~/.vim directory). Afterward, you create your your android project (this page explains well how to do it). And then you need to create an vjde project, in vim:

:Vjdeas filename.prj

This is actually a text file which permit to save variables to you project. Then I set it Vjde to look at android class, methods and package, in vim:

:let g:vjde_lib_path='/path/to/android/sdk/platforms/android-2.0/android.jar:build.classes'

And save it

:Vjdesave

Thanks to it, I can have functions/imports completion available with the CTRL-X+CTRL-U key combination (I need to load the project(:Vjdeload filename.prj) every time I want to work on it, I think there must be a way of doing it automatically but didn’t figure it out yet). It would also be possible to get the documentation integration thanks to the Vjde plugin, but I am used to have it in another window.

Then to try the program on the android emulator, I lunch the emulator, and in a terminal:

ant debug && adb install -r bin/yourAppName-debug.apk

You can then launch it in the android emulator menu (I looked for a way of lunching the program directly from the command line, but didn’t find :( ). To debug the app, you can launch the ddms tool which is part of the android sdk.

I hope this could be useful for some people who want to develop for the android platform and don’t want to use eclipse or netbeans IDE.