Android Development Environment Setup

Android 开发环境搭建

First, you can start Android application development on the following operating systems:

  • Microsoft Windows XP or higher.
  • Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher with an Intel chip.
  • Linux systems including GNU C library 2.7 or higher.

Second, all the tools required to develop Android applications are free and can be downloaded from the Internet. The following is a list of software you need to start developing Android applications.

  • Java JDK 5 or later version
  • Android SDK
  • Java Runtime Environment (JRE)
  • Android Studio
  • (Optional) Eclipse IDE for Java developers
  • (Optional) Android Development Tools (ADT) Eclipse plugin

The last two components are optional. If you are working on a Windows machine, these components will be convenient for developing Java-based applications. Therefore, let's see how to set up the required environment.

Installing Java Development Kit (JDK)

You can download the latest version of Java from Oracle's Java website:JDK Java SE DownloadDownload the latest version of Java. Find the installation instructions for JDK in the downloaded file, and install and configure settings according to the given instructions. Finally, set the PATH and JAVA_HOME environment variables to reference the directories containing javac and java, usually java_install_dir/bin and java_install_dir, respectively.

If you are running Windows, install JDK in C:\jdk1.6.0_15 and add the following content to the C:\autoexec.bat file:

set PATH=C:\jdk1.6.0_15\bin;%PATH%
set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.6.0_15

You can also right-click "My Computer", select "Properties" => "Advanced" => "Environment Variables", and then update the PATH value by pressing the "OK" button.

On Linux, if the SDK is installed under /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_15 and you are using C shell, write the following code into the .cshrc file.

setenv PATH /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_15/bin:$PATH
setenv JAVA_HOME /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_15

If you use the Eclipse integrated development environment, then it automatically knows where Java is installed.

Android IDE

There are many complex and sophisticated technologies for developing Android applications. At present, the main and similar technologies are mainly the following two:

Other extensions