Ant versus Eclipse builds for Android: Strengths of Each?

I've used Eclipse and vim variously as development environments for Andro开发者_开发技巧id 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.

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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.

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It has been some time (like six months) since I have used eclipse, so maybe it is better now, but I gave up on it because I found it to be very slow and buggy. Maybe it is the integration with ADT, but several times I spent hours hunting down problems that turned out to be fixed if I killed and restarted eclipse (and these problems were not fixed if I did a "clean" within eclipse). After doing that a few times, I felt like throwing the computer against the wall.

"ant clean" is much easier and faster than stopping and restarting eclipse.

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Across my personal projects and multiple professional instances of building Android apps, I've always used both types of builds. You'll want to use Ant (or Maven, if you prefer) to set up continuous integration and automated testing. Trying to get that working with Eclipse (which I did a long time ago when the Android SDKs were first coming out) is a nightmare, while Ant/Maven is easily used from any of your favorite CI tools (I've usually used Hudson for this). If there's nothing unusual about your project, it'll be a snap to put together continuous integration, and off you go.

Meanwhile, for just day to day development work, using Eclipse to build your app locally works just fine. But that can easily be left up to the individual developer. I'd make the build that your CI system is running the canonical build, but I do use Eclipse for my normal development.

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I'd use Eclipse until such time as you are happy with the debug build. Then you can set up Ant to produce the signed release build.

You can set it up to use the same source files as Eclipse but put the output binaries outside your workspace. You can also set it to use your release.keystore, sign it automatically and obfuscate the code all in one go.

I've set it up to do this. I open a command line (DOS box) move to the projects home directory (\dev\projects\Eclipse\Project1 say), I type "Ant release" and the apk ends up in \dev\projects\AntBuilds\Project1\bin as Project1-release.apk.

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If you want the best of both worlds, you might want to look at the m2eclipse-android-integration Eclipse plug-in which allows you to use your command-line Maven build in the ADT/Eclipse environment as well:

https://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/m2eclipse-android-integration/

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Well for me im just a beginner, but I find eclipse much easier to work with. Android is a pretty complicated to get used to (for me) so having everything layed out in a GUI is preferable to command line. Plus SDK updates and such are easier to get.