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Are there any frameworks out there which make it even more easy than it is to build Android applications and would you be interested in one?

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Sounds like a sales pitch, not exactly programming related. – KevinDTimm Sep 24 '09 at 8:59
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Just interested if there are any frameworks out there. – MrThys Sep 24 '09 at 10:42
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@kevindtimm in which way are questions about software frameworks not related to programming? Plus, stackoverflow is concerned with software development in general, not only programming. – Matthias Sep 24 '09 at 12:11
@Matthias I completely agree... though I have no idea why @MrThys felt like adding a bounty to this question. Rather silly imo. – Nik Reiman Sep 30 '10 at 11:47
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@Nik I added a bounty, not MrThys. Why is it silly? Having a framework/toolkit which lowers development time is worth much. – jgauffin Oct 1 '10 at 6:45

8 Answers

up vote 24 down vote accepted
+50

Soon there will be!

I am working on DroidFu, an Android shared library which will give you:

  • tons of utility functions available directly in Activities (and Services), such as spawning list and error dialogs, checking for Intent availability, and other workarounds/replacements for cases where Android lacks desired functionality
  • easy handling of asynchronous tasks (takes care of resurrecting dialogs after orientation changes)
  • Easy XML parsing using a convention over configuration based XML pull parser
  • new adapters and widgets, such as as ListAdapterWithProgress (rendering a loading spinner as the last element when loading something) or a GalleryItem widget which will lazy load an image via a URL while rendering a spinner
  • an ImageLoader which can load images from the web asynchonously, backed by a FIFO cache, great for rendering avatars in lists and stuff

I plan to make this available on GitHub.

stay tuned.

update (Feb 2013) Sorry to say that no one is working on this anymore. All people involved in the project have moved on, and since the lib was mostly used in the Qype app, no one feels like maintaining it anymore (Qype got acquired by Yelp btw, so I'm not even sure if we would be allowed to, since most of it was developed during my working hours at Qype.)

For anyone who feels like salvaging it, sources are here.

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DroidFu is now discountinued. The project owners have created a better android framework called "iginition" github.com/kaeppler/ignition – Albert Nov 26 '12 at 2:49
And of course, the project has moved again on Github: github.com/mttkay/ignition – greg7gkb Feb 13 at 2:57
Actually, it's worse: no one's maintaining it anymore. All people involved in the project have moved on to different jobs and work on other things now :-/ – Matthias Feb 13 at 10:15
up vote 6 down vote

Not really a 'software framework', but a tool to create simple apps easily (that's what Google says):

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

I don't use this tool since I'm not a big fan of this approach, but you could give it a try.

You can build many different types of apps with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like MoleMash or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.

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Seems to be redirecting to a dead URL at MIT. Anybody know where it went? – Jim Kiley Feb 3 at 18:09
This is the right site – Rakesh Mar 6 at 5:26
up vote 0 down vote

There's also phonegap, which you can use to write android apps using html+javascript.

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up vote 6 down vote

One of the best right now IMHO is Appcelerator

Free and open-sourced, develop one app for all major platforms (cross-platform), compiles the app to native code, has a rich API...

I enjoyed playing with it.. very easy to learn :)

Hope this help!

P.S.: even though it sounds like I work there, I don't... unfortunately for me :(

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You say it's open source but I've yet to find any links or instructions on how to obtain the source files for this. – Sosukodo Jun 4 '11 at 3:50
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The theory sounds great, but Appcelerator is pretty buggy; might work for simple apps, but hard to really get good UIs out with Titanium and especially on Android. iOS support of Titanium is much more enhanced than Android support. Also see this discussion on Quora: quora.com/… – Mathias Lin Aug 10 '11 at 8:13
I saw a short video of their office... Yeah, it's probably the only office I'd love to work in, except my own (in the future) :) – Cyril Sep 27 '11 at 8:40
2 years have passed, whats the status of Appcelerator for Android development today? – Janis Veinbergs Oct 12 '12 at 6:28
up vote 0 down vote

http://www.motherapp.com/ apparently converts 'HTML' to 'applications'.

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up vote 0 down vote

There are several frameworks of different scope and purpose to make mobile application development faster, or cross-platform, or code-free.

Technology thrives on competition and new ideas, so please don't take the presence of several other solutions as a deterrent from making your own if you think you can build a rounder wheel.

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up vote 0 down vote

The Simple framework is fully compatible with Android. Its an annotated approach for XML serialization and data binding, and is fully bi-directional. So you can read or write XML on the Android platform. Whats more is its really lightweight and has no external dependencies. In essence its like a JAXB substitute for the Android platform. For more information check out the Tutorial.

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up vote 15 down vote

I just found out about App Dev Wiki. As described on its website:

This wiki is meant to collect links, tools, libraries, and anything that is useful for mobile development.

Currently listed android frameworks are:

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1  
ignition seems to be a pretty good library. The only downside is it uses the pos called maven exclusively, which makes it a pain to get working. – Jeshurun Jul 25 '12 at 23:59

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