Android complex project organization

Question

Im thinking about trying to build a complex android app structure for a game maybe or just for practice reasons. Im used to code in objective-c, so im not that much experienced in android...

Anyway in work, we structure our app on ios like this:

-core framework: handling all core items, navigation, datahandling, mechanisms, etc. its the same in all of our project

-project framework: its files are mostly relying (including) the core framework's files, extending/modifying them, and doing the project depending stuff

-skin framework: this contains all the resources and images, if we want to do a re-skinned project, we only have to alter this

-main project: this includes everything just bashing together everything into an app. just starts the application, nothing more, anything else is done by the different frameworks

So I wanted to do a similar structure on android, but I'm not sure that I'm even able to do it... I see that there is android project and library project, I can include them into eachother... but my questions are:

1: can I build a similar structure as on ios?

2: can I make for example a "core" library what contains the basics of mechanisms, and another library containing only the resources, and a third one (or the third could be the actual runnable project), what can get resources from the resource library, can distribute jobs to the core library, etc...

3: can I organize the resources as I like (so not to throw every picture into the drawable folder root for example). For example to have somehow a characters folder (i know i cant do forlders in the res folder), and map files into map folder, etc... My only chance to name them "properly"? (map_sheet_type_1, map_sheet_type_2, character_sheet_type_1, etc) (if its going to be a game, it would use opengl, lots of sprite drawing, etc)

or I should do everything in a single project, dividing everything into a lot of packages, and use libraries only for jobs like "how to transcode "A" object into "B" object" ?

Thanks for the answers in advance

Answer 1

although I've never developed a game before, but an app is an app:

1. yes
2. as you mention you have executable projects and libraries projects, libraries can use other libraries and the only thing that goes to the device is whatever the executable project is building. It's just important to remark that compiled libraries *.jar files resources cannot be used in your executable project (that's why the ActionBar Sherlock have to be used as a library-project). In order to use a resource placed in a library project the project must be with its full source code open in the Eclipse so it can be compiled together. That is because inside an app, there's only one R (resources) object, and during build all the resources from all the projects are put together.
3. unfortunately no. As you mentioned yourself the resources cannot be in subfolders and even their file names are restricted as they can only use lower case letters, numbers and _ (underline). Just be clever and organised, write a spec or something.
4. packages IS the way to organize a single project in Java. If you gonna use multiple or single is your choice. Usually you can encapsulate in a library-project stuff that can easily be re-used in different projects, and the final project will contain everything that is specific to that one app/game. I'll give you an example on the place I work, we have a KicthenLibrary that is a library-project that we use in every single Android app we do. That library already contains an excellent multi-threaded bitmap download and cache classes, we used to have a MapFragment (now deprecated) before Google released their MapFragment, easy Http GET/POST methods, etc. As you can see, all of those are stuff that can easily be re-used in several different projects.

And just as a last trick, http://www.eclipse.org/egit/ IMHO is much easier to use GIT directly from inside Eclipse.