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.