The Android Software Development Kit (SDK), which Google provides for free, is a great starting point for developing an Android-based smart device application. The SDK contains a variety of useful materials for developers, including extensive documentation, tutorials, samples, best practice guidance, and an array of tools for numerous development purposes.
The SDK’s set of Java APIs gives application developers access to native functions that Android-based devices support, such as 2D and 3D graphics, multimedia codecs, telephony features, and location services. A device emulator in the SDK allows developers to try out their code directly from the development environment without requiring a physical device. And the SDK has an Eclipse plug-in that exposes the Android APIs and SDK tools in a rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Opening the door to collaboration
For an individual developer of Android code, the SDK is valuable and is becoming more so as it is being extended with new features all the time. However, it is missing features that facilitate the collaboration and coordination needed when a development team is creating the application.
By integrating the device-specific, native platform SDK from Google with a compatible commercial development solution, agile teams can achieve tremendous efficiencies and better results. Integrating the native Android SDK with a commercial development environment opens the door to seamless source control, iterative application planning, effortless work item management, and a host of enterprise-quality development capabilities for an Android application.
For instance, many Android applications are structured as hybrid web applications, where part of the application runs on an application server on the network delivering data to the device from an enterprise storage system, perhaps a mainframe computer. Another part of the hybrid application runs on the device itself, displaying the data it receives across the network and formatting it for the device form factor while accessing the device’s services such as GPS, camera, and accelerometer to deliver a rich and well-performing user experience.
Such a hybrid application is typically created by a small team comprising a few developers of the fundamental business logic and web application components, a few User Interface (UI) developers, a user experience designer, a couple of testers, and a team leader or manager. Let’s consider how this team can leverage the Android SDK in an environment that allows each member to efficiently communicate and collaborate.
Commercial static analysis products can be integrated with the Eclipse-based development environment and deliver the ability to analyze the code for quality and security issues. Some of these products can be integrated with the actual change set deliver process so that no code is integrated into the main line code stream unless it has been analyzed for fundamental quality and security issues.
All of the capabilities delivered by the commercial development products extend and enhance the basic SDK supplied by Google. While the Google Android SDK is the fundamental starting point for any project delivering code to be executed on the Android platform, the SDK can be dramatically more effective when integrated with the traditional agile team development features available in other Eclipse-based commercial products becoming more widely available today. This is really a boon for android app developers
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