On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 9:56 AM, Raghav Sood <[email protected]> wrote: > 1) Will I write this like an ordinary app? It will have a service that > connects to the internet to update a database or file (haven't decided yet).
You will have it as a project to generate your JAR, with a separate sample project showing how to use the JAR/library. Visit http://github.com/commonsguy and check out my cwac- family of repos for the pattern I use, with a demo/ subproject inside the main library project. Those are mostly Android library projects that also can be packaged in the form of a JAR. > 2) Do I need to have an activity even if all I need is the service? No, because the hosting project can supply whatever activities are needed. > 3) How do I compile it as a jar and not an apk? In Eclipse, I haven't a clue, though I presume there's some settings you can use to convert a traditional Android project into one generating a JAR. In Ant, you will create a custom Ant task or two to assist. See the build.xml files in the aforementioned cwac- projects. If your project will have resources, you will need to make it an Android library project. This puts some limitations if you want to ship the code *only* in JAR, as opposed to a full open source project. I have some documentation at the moldy http://andparcel.com site (also reproduced in newer versions of _The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development_) that covers some of this. > 4) My planned functionality is: Having an install count. This is kept using > a unique identifier for each and every device (that is each device, say HTC > Wildfire will have a unique identifier and not all the Wildfire's sharing > one.) I also plan on statistics. Is there anything else I should include? There are a number of analytics packages out there, particularly commercial ones (e.g., Flurry, Medialets). There might be open source ones, too -- I haven't gone looking for that recently. -- Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy) http://commonsware.com | http://github.com/commonsguy http://commonsware.com/blog | http://twitter.com/commonsguy Android Training...At Your Office: http://commonsware.com/training -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
