Building Hybrid Android Apps with Java and JavaScript

Chapter 2. Setting Up Your Android Development Environment

Hybrid applications involve a number of complementary technologies that are not native to the Android development environment and SDK. In this chapter, we will introduce you to some of the key technologies that will play a crucial role in helping us build our first hybrid Android app.

Most of the concepts described in this chapter are utilitarian in nature. These concepts will be used throughout the remainder of the book, so please go over them in detail.

The topics in this chapter range from setting up your development environment to the use of the various HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tools needed for an efficient development workflow. We will also cover some key design and implementation strategies related to mobile web application development. In addition to this, we will showcase some utility scripts that augment the Android build system to simplify day-to-day tasks.

In this section, we will describe how to set up the development environment for your hybrid Android application. For the scope of this book, we will use Eclipse as our primary development environment. Eclipse is a popular open source IDE that supports multiple languages and an extensible plug-in based architecture. The Android tool chain available from Google features plug-ins that can be integrated into the Eclipse workspace to streamline your Android application development experience.

Note

Eclipse is not required for Android development but is a handy tool with ...