Building A Popular Open-Source Android Library - Best practices and lessons learned

Building the same components from scratch for your Android projects just doesn’t make sense. This is why libraries are really powerful — you can use them to more easily build your creative projects, saving tons of time. And if you build something cool yourself, why not share it with the world? In this presentation, we briefly look at what it takes to successfully share your code with the world, learning from examples like android-async-http and bugsnag-android.

Transcript

1. BUILDING A POPULAR OPEN-SOURCE ANDROID LIBRARY BEST PRACTICES AND LESSONS LEARNED
2. JAMES SMITH loopj loopj
4. android-async-http http://loopj.com/android-async-http
5. WHAT IS A LIBRARY?
6. WHY SHOULD I BUILD A LIBRARY?
7. HOW DO OTHER PEOPLE USE LIBRARIES? https://github.com/google/gson https://github.com/bugsnag/bugsnag-android https://github.com/square/leakcanary http://square.github.io/picasso/
8. CREATING A LIBRARY
9. USE GRADLE $ android create lib-project --target <target_ID> \ --path path/to/your/project \ --package com.mylib \ --gradle \ --gradle-version 1.3.1
10. AAR VS JAR
11. HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR PROJECT # Build configuration build.gradle # Tests! src/androidTest/com/mylib/ # Main library classes src/main/com/mylib/
12. BUILDING THE LIBRARY $ gradle $ ./gradlew or
13. TESTING YOUR LIBRARY
14. WRITE AND USE UNIT TESTS http://developer.android.com/tools/testing/testing_android.html
15. RUN YOUR TESTS $ gradle clean connectedCheck
16. DOCUMENTING YOUR LIBRARY
17. README.MD JAVADOC EXAMPLE APPS
18. PUBLISHING YOUR LIBRARY
19. MAVEN CENTRAL vs JCENTER
20. AUTOMATING A RELEASE https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/publishing_maven.html https://github.com/chrisbanes/gradle-mvn-push https://github.com/bintray/gradle-bintray-plugin
21. TELL THE WORLD - GET FEEDBACK
22. REDDIT.COM/R/ANDROID ANDROID SUBREDDIT
23. NEWS.YCOMBINATOR.COM HACKER NEWS
24. https://plus.google.com/communities/ 105153134372062985968 OFFICIAL ANDROID GOOGLE+
25. CHECK OUT THE BUGSNAG LIBRARY https://github.com/bugsnag/bugsnag-android
26. THANK YOU!
27. QUESTIONS?