Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Android: The New Container

In the early days of Java Servlet development back in 1996 we had very little tool support. As the tools evolved the teams I was a part of started incorporating multiple build paths. The code was built in the IDE, but it was also built on the desktop using ant. This was good because the developers were building the same way as Cruisecontrol.

I think Android is going to be no different. I see a strong correlation between writing and testing servlets to run in the J2EE container and writing GUI and services for Android. For me this is marking a return to a platform with week tool support. The weakness I'm first percieving is unit testing. I have not yet found how to press one button to run all the tests. That is, one button press will launch the emulator (if needed), hot deploy the code to the container/emulator, and execute the in-container tests. Then there is the out-of-container tests that have no dependency upon the container.

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