Expert Android Studio

Chapter 12Writing Your Own Plugin

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• What are plugins?
• IntelliJ plugin architecture
• Writing your own plugin
• Interacting with UI
• Integrating with editor
• Packing and distributing plugins

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code download for this chapter is found at www.wrox.com/go/expertandroid on the Download Code tab. The code for this chapter is in the Chapter12.zip file.

Because Android Studio is great as is, you might think you would never need to implement a new feature. But you might need to write a plugin to meet a custom need and unleash your full development potential.

This chapter focuses on the architecture of IntelliJ plugins and shows you how to write a plugin that can act without code, resources, a UI, or even a build cycle. The ability to write your own plugins will enable you to fix missing functionality. You can even share your plugins with other developers.

WAR STORY: MANY WAYS TO SKIN A CAT

Murat was the team lead in a banking project that had multi-language support. The localization files were simple Java property files, each containing a locale. One supported locale was Turkish, which is known for some nonstandard characters such as ğ, ş, and 1. Those characters needed to be represented in Unicode to display correctly. When he joined the project, he was surprised to see that everyone had their own method of converting Turkish characters to Unicode. One team member wrote his own desktop app, another used a website, ...