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I have over a year of professional experience of web and application development in Java using Netbeans IDE... Now for a couple of applications that my company intends to come up with I need to get started with Android Development. And we eventually plan to get into Android and Arduino based applications cum embedded system development..

With all these having said I would like to get a word from all you folks on how should I get started with Android development...

What I want to know is

  1. Which IDE is better from Android perspective? Netbeans or Eclipse?
  2. Are there any frameworks like Struts hibernate and UI development Frameworks like jQuery in Android?
  3. we plan to come up with android versions of our existing applications like ERP solutions and other's.. they are built in Java using Struts2 and jQuery.. How should we get started to port them on android?
  4. While I started with Android in netbeans it asked me about the version of Android like 3,4.0 and other for which I am developing my application.. So which version of android OS should we think off while getting started with development?

NB: I am a experienced Java developer but an absolute beginner with Android.. post and opinions on how we can start with Android and Arduino are most welcome...

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You question seems too open ended for SO. Please see: stackoverflow.com/faq#dontask – Morrison Chang Jan 8 at 17:28
@morrision yeah buddy I do understand that my post was pretty general but I am really an absolute beginner so I thought that I should be on point zero and get the feedback from folks as it will help us not to get into troubles later... I have had really bad experience of starting off without proper discussion and then being in severe mess...!! – svg Jan 9 at 18:23
@svg: I agree with you that getting good answers to this type of question is super important, it's just that SO isn't the right forum for the discussion. – tom10 Jan 9 at 21:35
There is a site proposal for an Arduino specific site area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/49538/arduino . If you want, you can support it and help in making it go live ! Any arduino question would be welcome there (if well-framed). – AsheeshR Jan 30 at 8:11
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2 Answers

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The offical supported development tool is the Eclipse ADT Plugin.

To decide for which version you want to develop you should look at this chart. It shows the distribution of android versions. The more devices you want to reach the older the version you have to support. I think 2.2 or 2.3 is a good version to start.

Frameworks like Struts or Hibernate are too oversized for Android. Instead of Hibernate you can use a SQLite ORM framework like Green Dao Orm or OrmLite

You should also not try to port your existing Struts application to Android.

  • If you want to create a native Android application you should adept the UI to the Android UI Guidelines. And remember that you don't need every feature of your Struts application in your Android app. You should reduce the features to the ones that are useful on mobile devices
  • An alternative would be to create a mobile version of your existing website and show this website on mobile devices. Using this way you can use most parts of your existing application. If you want to have something in the android market you can create a small App that is only used for showing the mobile website.
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up vote 1 down vote

Eclipse is officially supported by Google, although my personal favorite is IntelliJ.

If you want to create Android applications based off of existing web applications, you might want to look into something like PhoneGap.

I usually set my minimum SDK to 8 (Froyo) because many users still have older software on their devices. I haven't encountered too many people who have phones with earlier software.

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