I am using Eclipse with the ADT plugin, as well as ant. I am trying to design a plug-in architecture. I have three projects, call them Main, Plugin, and Impl. Main builds a service apk, Plugin is an Android Library. Plugin just defines two classes, AbstractPlugin and PluginFactory. AbstractPlugin is an interface, and PluginFactory does what is necessary to set up a DexClassLoader and instantiate by reflection a class from Impl which implements that interface. Main uses the resulting AbstractPlugin in some way.
Therefore, the compile-time dependencies are Main -> Plugin and Impl -> Plugin. There is no compile time dependency between Main and Impl, since the class in Impl is instantiated by reflection. Therefore, when the Main.apk is built, classes from Plugin are included but classes from Impl are not. The problem is then how to get those dex'd classes in Impl into the phone in a place where DexClassLoader can get at them. There are two options. First, Impl can be built as an Android library, then the resulting classes.jar can be manually dex'd with dx, and then the resulting classes-dex.jar can be pushed into some predetermined directory on the phone. This works, but I am not entirely thrilled with it. For one thing, it prevents Impl from having any resources of its own, only Java code. Second, Impl can be built as an apk which just happens to contain neither a service nor an activity. This can be installed normally, and then PluginFactory can get the path to the apk from the PackageManager to pass it to DexClassLoader. The problem with this approach is that in each configuration I have tried so far, Impl.apk ends up pulling in the classes from Plugin as well since there is a compile time dependency. Therefore when DexClassLoader tries to resolve something, it realizes there are now two different AbstractPlugin implementations in the system (which are really the same one in two different apks), and bails out. What I would like to do is keep Plugin on the classpath during the build of Impl, but exclude its classes from the apk. Is there a way to set this up either in Eclipse or in Ant directly? (What about in maven?) This does not necessarily solve the resource problem since the active Context in Main would not necessarily know about the resources in Impl if it had any, but it would be a start. -- 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
