Ant versus Eclipse builds for Android: Strengths of Each?

Question

I've used Eclipse and vim variously as development environments for Android applications and found both the Eclipse plugin and the command-line SDK tools to be of similar capability.

Since I haven't explored either in its entirety, however, I'd like to ask:

What advantages are there to using Eclipse over the command-line tools and vice-versa?

I could see:

• (Eclipse) nice GUI for debugging
• (ant/adb/android) more amenable to automation
• (hybrid) you can have it all, can't you!?

I'm especially interested in specific features that may be a deal-breaker for one and move a developer in the direction of the other.

Answer 1

Using Eclipse as a development environment for Android doesn't preclude you from also building with Ant to hook into nightly builds or CI tools. You could even configure Eclipse to build using your Ant buildfile if you wanted. If you want some kind of CLI build tool, you might also consider Maven, as it also has plugins to enable building Android apps.