Re: [GSoC] Android Impress Remote: Weekly Report #0

Hi All,

I thought that this will be an interesting discussion ;-)

My GSoC proposal mentioned movement to Maven because…
* It is really easy to manage dependencies.
* It is really easy to manage lifecycle: compiling, dexing, obfuscating, aligning.
* It is possible to check code style, catch some bugs and run tests as well.
* It is really easy to use anywhere: IDE, console — it does not really matter.

The current building is based on keeping libraries in the source tree which is not a perfect 
solution.
Maven downloads dependencies and plugins from Maven Central — a repository for artifacts 
(libraries).
It is possible to use other repositories and create new ones of course.

I meant using Maven as a tool, not compiling it when building an application (or I don’t understand 
something).
Maven is a build tool, like make, but with really heavy steroids.

You can look at my open source application as an example of Maven usage [1].
Maven files are pom.xml, application/pom.xml and tests/pom.xml.

The current version of the project uses Ant (yes, we already have a build tool inside a build tool 
so you can build while you build) which will be deprecated because there will be a new build system 
[2].
The new build system is based on Gradle. I decided not to use it now because it is kind of a beta.
Google announced Android Studio — IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA and it uses the new build system as 
well.

So my goal is to prepare a transition to the new build system. Migration from Maven to Gradle is 
really easy.
I repeat — Ant will be deprecated, Gradle is not ready enough, so I picked up Maven as the best 
solution at moment.

About Tinderbox. The only command for building an application with Maven is “mvn clean package”, so 
I see no troubles with that.

I am not against of moving mobile apps (Android and iOS) to separate repositories.
The only issue I see is a code review process — now it is possible to use Gerrit and I do not know 
is it possible to use it for multiple repositories.

Sorry for the large text — I just want to clarify things.

Regards,
Artur.

[1]: https://github.com/ming13/gambit
[2]: https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/325236644