Android code , Android Phone, Android Developers

Navigate to the Eclipse Downloads page at www.eclipse.org/downloads, shown in the following illustration. As the opening paragraph states, the JRE is required (Java 5 JRE recommended) to develop in Eclipse, which you took care of in the previous section. Download the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers from this site. The package is relatively small (79MB) and should download fairly quickly. Be sure not to download the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers, as this is a slightly different product and I will not be covering its usage.

After you have downloaded Eclipse, it is time to install it. Navigate to the location where you downloaded the Eclipse package. As of the writing of this book, the latest
Eclipse package file for Microsoft Windows is eclipse-java-europa-fall2-win32.zip. Expand the package and run the eclipse.exe file. Eclipse installs to your User directory by default (under Microsoft Windows), but you may want to install it to your Program Files directory. This will keep your applications in order and still allow you to set a different location for your workspaces.

Need Comments guys on this. How it cracked and what happens to Google Nexus

Why is Eclipse the recommended IDE for Android applications? There are a few reasons for this particular endorsement:

● In keeping with the Open Handset Alliance’s theme of truly opening the mobile development market, Eclipse is one of the most fully featured, free, Java IDEs available. Eclipse is also very easy to use, with a minimal learning curve. This makes Eclipse a very attractive IDE for solid, open Java development.

● The Open Handset Alliance has released an Android plugin for Eclipse that allows you to create Android-specific projects, compile them, and use the Android Emulator to run and debug them. These tools and abilities will prove invaluable when you are creating your first Android apps. You can still create Android apps in other IDEs, but the Android plugin for Eclipse creates certain setup elements—such as files and compiler settings—for you. The help provided by the Android plugin for Eclipse saves you precious development time and greatly reduces the learning curve, which means you can spend more time creating incredible applications.

NOTE
Eclipse is also available for Mac and Linux. Having greater availability, on numerous operating systems, means that almost anyone can develop Android applications on
any computer. However, the examples and screenshots in this book are given from the Microsoft Windows version of Eclipse. Keep this in mind if you are using Eclipse
in a non-Microsoft environment; your interface may look slightly different from the screenshots, but the overall functionality should not change. If there is a major change
in operation of Eclipse under Linux, I will include an example of that change. I will provide several examples from within a Linux environment. The majority of these
examples will be from the Linux/Android command-line environment.

Android applications are developed in Java. Android itself is not a language, but rather an environment within which to run applications. As such, you can theoretically use any distribution or integrated development environment (IDE) you have at your disposal to begin your development. In fact, you can choose to use no IDE at all. If you are more comfortable with one Java IDE over any other, such as JBuilder by Borland or the open source NetBeans, feel free to use it. With a moderate level of experience, you should still be able to follow along with the majority of the examples in this book. However, the Open Handset Alliance and Google do endorse one Java IDE over any others: Eclipse.