Making sense of Android’s complex development process

Image via CrunchBase

Back in about 1997 I bought a book about this new programming environment – it seemed something bigger than a language but smaller than an operating system – called Java.

Back then the idea seemed great – write once, run anywhere – but there was a lot of scepticism and, of course, Microsoft tried to poison the well through the tactics of “embrace and extend” with their J++ offering. All of that made it look as though Java was going nowhere.

I wrote a couple of applets – one was a “countdown” timer for Trevor Philips‘s mayoral election website in 1999, another was a SAX based parser for the largely Perl-based content management system I wrote for the Scottish Labour Party the following year, ahead of the 2001 election. But no one seemed to like applets much – it seems ridiculous now, but the 90K download needed for the SAX parser really slowed down the Scottish party’s site, even though I was pretty proud of the little newsticker it delivered (along with annoying teletype noises as it went). I forgot about Java.

But, of course, that was wrong. Java is programming language du jour these days, though Microsoft’s responses to the success of Java and the failure of J++, C# and .net, are also big.

Android is, of course, Java’s most prominent offer these days – literally millions of people will be running Android apps even as I write this and thousands of Android phones are being bought across the world daily. Time to get reacquainted, especially as my new job is once more about political communications.

But, as I discovered with C++ when I came back to it after over a decade for my MSc, Java has moved on a fair bit in that time and, unlike C++, I cannot say all the progress seems to be positive. Indeed Java seems to thrive on a particularly ugly idiom with developers being encouraged to write constructors of anonymous classes in the headers of functions – ugh.

I can certainly see the beauty of Groovy more clearly than ever, too. Though being an old time Perl hacker makes me resent Java’s heavy duty static typing in any case.

To help me through all this I have been reading O’Reilly‘s Programming Android: Java Programming for the New Generation of Mobile Devices. Now, usually O’Reilly’s books are all but guaranteed to be the best or close to the best of any on offer, but I have my doubts that is the case with this one – it seems to be sloppily edited (eg at different times it is difficult to follow whether one is being advised to use the Android SDK or the Eclipse editor) and falls between being a comprehensive introduction to Android programming and a guide for Java hackers to get on with it. It feels less than ordered, to be honest.

Now, maybe this is a function of the language and the complexity of the environment, I don’t know. But I would welcome any alternative recommendations if anyone has some.

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