What's the Eclipse Andmore Project?

Question

Android Studio was announced in May 2013 and maintained by Android technology team since then. It is based on the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, added features that are designed specifically for Android development and cooperated with JetBrains, creators of one of the most advanced Java IDEs available today. As the official Android IDE, Android Studio gives us access to a powerful and comprehensive suite of tools to evolve our app across Android platforms, whether it's on the phone, wrist, car or TV.

As Android Studio arises, Eclipse, the powerful open-sourced IDE, worked with Android Developer Tools (ADT) to create gorgeous Android apps, begins to fall. Now that when Android M Preview was released, Eclipse couldn't work with the latest Android SDK whose structure was changed but Eclipse couldn't adapt it.

It is said that development and official support for the ADT in Eclipse will be ended at the end of the year, just to make way for focus on all of their efforts on making Android Studio better and faster. But Eclipse isn't abandoned completely for Android Development. Android tools inside it continues to live. They created a new project called Andmore - Eclipse Android Tooling.

So, what is Andmore? Now that ADT in Eclipse is not supported any more, they create this Eclipse Android Tooling for what? After Eclipse don't work for Android development at all, developers would switch to Android Studio, the official IDE, I think, will someone prefer Andmore in Eclipse? If so, what are advantages of Andmore in Eclipse which force them to choose it?

Any tips will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The purpose of Andmore is to provide Android Eclipse tooling without having to go through multiple steps.

The technology development involves integrating and refactoring the Google ADT plugins as necessary to work with the project. Similarly, the former MOTODEV plugins have components that can be integrated into the project.

Andmore includes:

• JDT for Android Java applications.
• CDT for C/C++ shared libraries.
• Gradle tooling (details TBD)
• Maven Build support via the M2E-Android Eclipse Plugin.
• Ant support via the built in Eclipse support for ANT.
• A fork of Google's ADT (Android Development Tools) plugins for Eclipse.These are maintained separately from Google's code line at AOSP, which will not be updated with any regularity.
• The former MOTODEV Studio Plugins (now part of the Android Open Source Project) upgraded to work with ADT.
• A p2 repository and product build using tycho.
• Mylyn Reviews for Gerrit Review integration.
• EGit for source code management.
• GitHub Plugin from EGit for better collaboration with GitHub projects.

In addition to components, Andmore will produce an EPP package.

The source code for Andmore is maintained on Github. To contribute, please make sure you have a signed CLA with the Eclipse Foundation on file, and fork the repository. Pull requests and will be reviewed by an existing committer before being merged.

Source repository can be found at https://github.com/eclipse/andmore/