Android Framework?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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:

• ignition
• droid-fu
• RoboGuice
• Commonsware
• ActionBarSherlock
• Spring Android
• DroidParts

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

To continue the list :

I am working on the BARACUS framework, which focus is to ease the pain of Android component development.

Current features:

• Bean Container with Dependency Injection (type based on Interfaces or Implementations)
• pure Java Configuration
• Bean lifecycle management
• Tiny OR-Mapper solution to have basic ORM w. lazy loading and automatic Row Mapping
• Declarative form validation
• Database hot backup and recovery
• Automated database version management + automated migration

The library is available through maven central repository (including a maven archetype).

Also, a set of tutorials is available on blogstpot

The library is Apache2 licensed, open source (on github) and free usable in any projects (commercial+non-commercial).