Android Installation Details

Question

I am new to android and I want to know some basic stuffs which I was not able to find after lot of googling. In installation of android I found three things , Android SDK ,Eclipse ,ADT Plugin ...I want to know how android SDK is related with ADT Plugin ... I want to know if I have installed ADT Plugin in Eclipse then what is the need of installing Android SDK .

Answer 1

Here is the documentation on the ADT http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html As it states you need the SDK and Eclipse installed also. It is a plugin that allows Eclipse to do certain functions such as "quickly set up new Android projects, create an application UI, add packages based on the Android Framework API, debug your applications using the Android SDK tools, and even export signed (or unsigned) .apk files in order to distribute your application." Otherwise you would be doing it all through the command line rather than through a nice environment like Eclipse.

To be honest, and on a tangent, setting up Eclipse / SDK / ADT etc is a bit of a barrier initially. My first setup took a good while, but once I got what I was meant to be doing it makes a lot more sense. Best of luck.

EDIT: Eclipse lets you write your code in a nice environment. Android Debugging Tool (ADT) allows you to write ANDROID projects in Eclipse. SDK allows you to compile your code, run it, emulator etc.

Answer 2

The ADT plugin is part of the whole Android SDK.

It gives you direct access from Eclipse to tools that are part of the SDK and otherwise accessible through the command line.

No matter what, if you want to develop Android applications, you need to install the SDK.