Making a redistributable component or library for Android

Question

I'm just starting out on Android and Java programming, coming in from a C++ background. I was wondering - whats the best way to go about making a library/UI widget/component that I can license to third-party developers?

In C++ I'd ship the customers my headers and *.a files, but I don't know the equivalent in Java.

Are there any good resources or links about this, maybe even from general Java development standpoint.

Answer 1

you can define activities/services that are available for any other application running on android:

"A central feature of Android is that one application can make use of elements of other applications (provided those applications permit it). For example, if your application needs to display a scrolling list of images and another application has developed a suitable scroller and made it available to others, you can call upon that scroller to do the work, rather than develop your own. "

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html

Answer 2

Activities and services have some use but there is a whole class of functionality (fancy table viewer for sql) that isn't covered. You can do jars but I don't think you can have android resources in that file. The work around would be to have a Jar and require the user to copy and paste some text into the apps resource directory. You can look at the admob.com android SDK for an example of this.