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  • Book Overview & Buying Gradle for Android
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Gradle for Android

Gradle for Android

By : Kevin Pelgrims
5 (3)
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Gradle for Android

Gradle for Android

5 (3)
By: Kevin Pelgrims
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

If you are an experienced Android developer wanting to enhance your skills with the Gradle Android build system, then this book is for you. As a prerequisite, you will need some knowledge of the concepts of Android application development.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
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1
1. Getting Started with Gradle and Android Studio
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1. Getting Started with Gradle and Android Studio
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Android Studio
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Understanding Gradle basics
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Creating a new project
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Getting started with the Gradle Wrapper
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Migrating from Eclipse
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Summary
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2. Basic Build Customization
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2. Basic Build Customization
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Understanding the Gradle files
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Getting started with tasks
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Customizing the build
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Summary
3
3. Managing Dependencies
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3. Managing Dependencies
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Repositories
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Local dependencies
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Dependency concepts
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Inside Android Studio
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Summary
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4. Creating Build Variants
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4. Creating Build Variants
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Build types
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Product flavors
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Build variants
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Signing configurations
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Summary
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5. Managing Multimodule Builds
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5. Managing Multimodule Builds
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The anatomy of a multimodule build
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Adding modules to a project
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Tips and best practices
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Summary
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6. Running Tests
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6. Running Tests
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Unit tests
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Functional tests
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Test coverage
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Summary
7
7. Creating Tasks and Plugins
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7. Creating Tasks and Plugins
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Understanding Groovy
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Getting started with tasks
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Hooking into the Android plugin
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Creating your own plugins
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Summary
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8. Setting Up Continuous Integration
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8. Setting Up Continuous Integration
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Jenkins
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TeamCity
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Travis CI
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Further automation
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Summary
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9. Advanced Build Customization
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9. Advanced Build Customization
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Reducing the APK file size
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Speeding up builds
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Ignoring Lint
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Using Ant from Gradle
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Advanced app deployment
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Summary
10
Index
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Index

Android Studio

Android Studio was announced and released (as an early access preview) by Google in May 2013, alongside support for Gradle. Android Studio is based on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA, but is designed specifically with Android development in mind. It is available for free for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Compared to Eclipse, Android Studio has an improved user interface designer, a better memory monitor, a nice editor for string translation, warnings for possible Android-specific issues and a lot more features aimed at Android developers. It also features a special project structure view for Android projects, besides the regular Project view and Packages view that exist in IntelliJ IDEA. This special view groups Gradle scripts, drawables, and other resources in a convenient way. As soon as the stable version 1.0 of Android Studio was released, Google retired the Android Developer Tools (ADT) for Eclipse and recommended all developers to switch to Android Studio. This means that Google will not provide new features for Eclipse anymore, and all IDE-related tool development is now focused on Android Studio. If you are still using Eclipse, it is time to change if you do not want to be left behind.

This screenshot shows what Android Studio looks like for a simple Android app project:

Android Studio

Staying up to date

There are four different update channels for Android Studio:

  • Canary brings bleeding-edge updates, but might contain some bugs
  • The Dev channel gets an update more or less every month
  • Beta is used feature complete updates that might still contain bugs
  • The Stable channel, which is the default, features thoroughly tested releases that should be bug-free

By default, Android Studio checks every time it starts if there any updates available and notifies you.

When you launch Android Studio for the first time, it starts a wizard to set up your environment and to make sure you have the latest Android SDK and the necessary Google repositories. It also gives you the option to create an Android Virtual Device (AVD), so you can run apps on the emulator.

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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Gradle for Android
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