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Google Releases Android Studio 1.0, the First Stable Version of Its IDE
An anonymous reader writes After two years of development, Google today released Android Studio 1.0, the first stable version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) aimed solely at Android developers. You can download the tool right now for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the Android Developer site. Google first announced Android Studio, built on the popular IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, at its I/O Developer conference in May 2013. The company's pitch was very simple: this is the official Android IDE.
From what I've read, it looks like a decent IDE, comparable with similar items (Eclipse, for example.) The fact that it allows one to display text and other items and see how it will look on a number of devices at once is a nice touch.
The proof will be in the pudding -- I wonder how usable it will be as a day to day tool for app developers and coding houses, especially with multiple people doing check-ins and such.
Good riddance.
...used to develop J2SE or J2EE applications or is it tied to Android development only?
Note: I was too lazy to RTFA.
The link in TFS is either broken or was taken down. The wordpress blog it points to is displaying a customized 404 error page.
For those that don't know, Android Studio is JetBrains' Intellij product re-packaged to promote Android. If you like Intellij, there you go. It's a much, much better experience than Eclipse / ADT.
It still won't update from a 0.9 to a 1.0 version with a regular patch, prepare for all kinds of sorrow while you try to upgrade. Dependencies, good luck. Back up everything you have, twice, before you attempt updating through the SDK Manager.
Gradle also hit 1.0, what a coincidence. If you get it upgraded correctly in-line without having to delete the entire IDE and start over, Gradle now takes longer and not less time to do builds.
In addition, Gradle's upgrade will break your unit tests. Suddenly you get new errors like "The current Gradle build type does not support this test." Now that you have Android Studio updated, finally, you have to rip out Gradle and reinstall it by hand to fix this.
Google suddenly closed 11,000 bugs all at once, claiming they're all fixed and obsolete. 11,000 bugs, just solved overnight! Yeah Fucking Right.
Your best bet is to back up your entire environment, wipe the PC, reinstall the operating system, reinstall Android Studio from the ground up, and then import your projects back in. Make sure to sacrifice a few chickens in your backyard and pray to Sergei to make everything work.
I wish I'd never touched this platform, the developer tools are a constantly evolving state of CLUSTERFUCK.
The two solve completely different problems?
Make is horrible anyway, the syntax is just bad. But ignoring that- make, bash, perl, or python build scripts solve the problem of building code. That's not what an IDE does (in fact it generally just calls a build script when it does do it). An IDE is a graphical editor with built in features useful for editing code and a tightly linked debugging environment. THe build stuff is a minor component of one. Even most people who do use home rolled scripts to build use an IDE to edit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Did you miss the reference to emacs ? (IOW, the code entry and editing part of the process) :-)
Yes you are correct about building under an IDE, but since the IDE needs to call a script to do the build, what's wrong with just invoking that script directly when you want to do a build ?
Enjoy building a graphical user interface using nothing but emacs.
Try using an IDE and learning the features. You'll answer your own question.
How can "bloated" be a thing in 2014? Do you program on a Commodore Amiga or what?
I tried the Android IDE. All I got was more questions. Plenty of time to ponder them while waiting for the emulator to load and run my app, though.
more questions, like what you'd get if you gave someone make and emacs and told them to go for it?
Modern IDEs practically write half your code for you and you know if you have a problem, before you even compile it. Developing in emacs will never be as fast, I don't care how good you are at it.
Yeah? Then screw it.
Use an IDE to edit? You're kidding, right?
Why in all that's holy would I load up a multi-megabyte behemoth instead of using a text editor for editing code? I use the IDE to fix build errors that result, and to do the debugging.
But with ant handling the build process and a decent debugger, I see absolutely no need for an IDE. In fact, Eclipse crashes about half the time I try to use it, so I can't use it for projects the size I work on as a build manager. It pukes itself far too often, forcing a complete rebuild every time. And the more code has to be rebuilt, the more likely it is to puke on itself.
No man. A decent editor like vi or emacs, a build manager, and a debugger are all you need. Loading up a whole IDE is overkill.
But then again, I've never seen any debuggers other than IDEs for Java.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Why it is available only on Win, Linux and Mac ? I want to develop directly on my Android tablet !!!
Has anyone been using this for Scala development with the android-sdk-plugin? I've been working on my first Scala android app and see it as a big improvement over Java. The only negative is that I've been using sbt+emacs instead of the blessed android dev environment (which used to be Eclipse) so I've been missing some features.
IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment.
There is no requirement that it be 'graphical', both yourself and the original poster are wrong in that presumption.
The original IDEs were ALL text based.
IDEs are simply a suite of tools that work together (in a convenient way) to make developing software easier, all other constraints you add are not actual constraints.
Emacs is fully capable of functioning as an IDE and in fact part of the reason it is what it is happens to be because a certain GNU fanboy used it as his IDE and he happens to be its author.
Those of us who don't still live in the stone age don't really think of it as an IDE, but it most certainly is a very capable one.
Oh, and it works in a GUI too, just put an X in front of its name, and as if by magic, you have a gui wrapper around it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Its sad that this took so long that even Visual Studio will support Android and NDK development in its next release and Google is JUST NOW releasing real tools for one of its flagship data collection platforms.
Android users (meaning both owners of devices and device makers) - You are the product, not the customer. FFS do you not understand the saying 'You get what you pay for'
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I have a few devices for testing. I have NOT tried this but it might be interesting:
"The Remote Test Lab is a solution that enables developers to control devices remotely. Using the Remote Test Lab service, you can test your application on a real device."
http://developer.samsung.com/r...
JDB is a text based java debugger. Most IDEs are graphical shells for it, similar to ddd and gbd in C land.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Real men use vim
THIS. I can't fucking stand it when people say it's faster to program in Notepad or Vi or whatever than it is in Eclipse, Android Studio, or whatever. It's absolutely not; if you can go fast in Notepad then you can go fast in a "bloated" IDE.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Also, as of 24.4, Emacs supports adb as a backend for its remote editing and execution functionality (aka tramp), so you can edit files and run commands directly on Android devices from the comfort of your Emacs desktop.
"Why in all that's holy would I load up a multi-megabyte behemoth instead of using a text editor for editing code?"
Because with modern auto-complete you can churn out code an order of magnitude faster?
You never have to look up API documentation again because it gets put there in front of, you only have to press a few keys out of tens to get the code into your code file that you want, and you can see related code like definitions and references without having to go searching manually for it.
Put simply, most IDEs offer at their core intelligent text editors, tools that can do everything your text editor can but with an understanding of the code that allows you to jump between parts of it and understand how sections interact without any effort.
The real question is why wouldn't I want to spend 5 seconds loading a multi-megabyte IDE when you can write, understand, maintain, and debug code 10x faster in it?
"But then again, I've never seen any debuggers other than IDEs for Java."
Maybe this is the problem if all you've encountered are things like Eclipse, which are genuinely slow, clunky, and painful to use to the extent you've already typed your code manually before the autocomplete dropdown has even woken up. There are terrible IDEs just like there is terrible software of all types, but don't judge them all by the poorest examples.
Try using something like Visual Studio and you'll soon understand.
In its favour the Android integration is far better - obviously. Android Studio provides all of the tools out of the box to build an Android app from end to end which includes all the packaging and signing at the end. In Eclipse you can can develop and debug easily enough but if you want an apk you have to manually invoke a dialog to package and sign APK. This is a huge pain.
Note that AS doesn't actually build anything. Everything is farmed out to a gradle script. This means you can build from AS, or the command line or even from Jenkins from the same script. This is very useful and you can your own custom tasks, unit tests and other goodness to your scripts. But... gradle is goddamned slow. As in REALLY slow. Even if you configure it spawn a daemon so it doesn't respawn all the time (yes I've done that) it's still slow. The problem is if you change a Java class it still has to run through every task checking the dependencies to see what needs to be built and it takes too damned long.
Eclipse is extremely good at incremental building so you can make a change and hit run and in seconds you're debugging. Eclipse is also superior for marking code in error - AS only tends to know about errors local to the file, e.g. syntax errors. If you call a method in another class and get the params wrong you might only be told when gradle reports an error. In Eclipse it would have told you instantly which means turnaround is so much faster. I also prefer the Java editor in Eclipse, because it knows more about your project as a whole, the code completion and hints are more immediate and useful. I'm also used to the keybindings but AS has some Eclipse keybindings so that doesn't matter too much.
Android Studio does have some excellent code analysis tools. It has Android lint integrated into the build and there are a pile of things it can search for in addition to that and in many cases will offer automatic solutions. It also has nicely integrated view and fragment editors which work better than the ones in Eclipse.
AS is a terrible CPU hog. I've noticed it eating anywhere between 5-30% of the CPU depending on what panes are open. This is a serious problem on a laptop because the fan starts whirring and the battery life suffers. The command prompt pane is the worst of all and I only assume it's killing the CPU by continuously polling. Source code integration is also inferior to Eclipse - EGit is a wonderfully mature plugin these days with some complex and useful functionality - the support for Git in AS seems quite perfunctory by comparison although it covers the basics.
So to summarise pros for AS:
And the cons:
I'm working on my first Android app right now, using Andoid Studio. I'm thrilled, as I could NOT get a stable Eclipse environment working for Android on my Windows box, even though I had successfully done Blackberry programming with Eclipse.
AS beta 0.8.14 has been rock solid. I'm a bit paranoid to upgrade in the middle of a project, and will stick to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.
Are there any significant advantages of using Studio vs vanilla IntelliJ (which does have Android support) other than the Google branding?
People who use Emacs for development understand that the GUI definition in Android is just XML, and the layout can be better controlled by editing it by hand rather than dragging things around with a mouse and trying to align them by sight.
I spend far less time waiting for yasnippet to expand the appropriate boilerplate, semantic to complete variable and function names, and flycheck to highlight the bugs I just finished writing than my colleagues seem to with their IDEs. About the only feature missing from Emacs that is all the rage in IDEs these days is the ability to whimsically change your whole codebase archtecturally, causing guaranteed merge conflicts for all your co-workers with a single button press.
No, more questions like "Why doesn't this match the documentation?" and "Why is this is god damn fucking slow?".
Emacs/vi/vim and make are terrible to use, but at least they work as described in the docs and don't take forever to do anything on a 4.5 GHz i7.
I'd like IDEs a lot better if they didn't bury stuff like build information in menus and dialogs. Android tutorials and such always encourage new developers to start from an example, so that's what I've done on multiple occasions. But I quickly get annoyed because I don't know everything that's happening under the hood, so I basically have to google every time I want to do anything. If it could give me one big, organized text file or script that controls how it's built (with environment variables for portability), I'd be so much happier. But no, I have to right-click on the project, open a submenu (the 17th of 38 menu items), click on Project Build Path or something like that, click on this other tab, click the Add JARs button, browse to the desired files...
Did you know that emacs, as distributed by debian, is over 100MB?
I bet most of this is RMS eastereggs.
That's why Solaris Zones are best development environment to this day. You don't need freekin' reinstall just to have new IDE working or testing apps in isolated but full speed environment. Also try using DTrace do debug in-production applications and services. And yes, illumos distributions are open source. (and there's also KVM under zones..)