Setting up our Android development platform is a bit tedious but is hopefully performed once and for all!
In summary, we installed all the prerequisite packages on our system. Some of them are specific to the target OS, such as Cygwin on Windows, Developer Tools on OS X, or build-essential packages on Linux. Then, we installed the Android Studio bundle, which contains both the Android Studio IDE and the Android SDK. The Android NDK has to be downloaded and set up separately.
Even if we will not use it much throughout this book, Android Studio remains one of the best choices for pure Java development. It is guaranteed to be maintained by Google and may become a good choice when Gradle NDK's integration gets more mature.
Meanwhile, the simplest solution is to go with Eclipse for NDK development. We installed Eclipse with the ADT and CDT plugin. These plugins integrate well together. They allow combining the power of Android Java and native C/C++ code into one single IDE.
Finally, we launched an Android emulator and connected an Android device to our development platform through the Android Debug Bridge.
Tip
With the Android NDK being "open", anybody can build its own version. The Crystax NDK is a special NDK package built by Dmitry Moskalchuk. It brings advanced features unsupported by the NDK (latest toolchains, Boost out of the box… exceptions were first supported by the CrystaxNDK). Advanced users can find it on the Crystax website at https://www.crystax.net/en/android/ndk.
We now have the necessary tools in our hands to shape our mobile ideas. In the next chapter, we will tame them to create, compile, and deploy our first Android project!