Installing Eclipse and the Android SDK

The recommended environment for developing Android applications is Eclipse with the Android Development Toolkit (ADT) plugin installed. I’ll summarize the process here. If you need more detail, Google’s own developer pages do a good job of explaining the installation and configuration process.

• Download the Android SDK for your platform (Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux).
• Extract the downloaded file to somewhere memorable on your hard drive (on Linux, I use /opt/local/).
• If you don’t already have Eclipse installed, download and install the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers package. For programming, Google recommends using Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo).
• Run Eclipse and choose Help->Install New Software.
• Click Add in the Available Software window.
• Enter Android Development Tools in the Name field, and https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ in the Location field.
• Click OK and check Developer Tools in the list of available software. This will install the Android Development Tools and DDMS, Android’s debugging tool.


• Click Next and Finish to install the plugin. You’ll need to restart Eclipse once everything is installed.
• When Eclipse restarts, choose Window->Preferences and you should see Androidlisted in the categories.
• You now need to tell Eclipse where you’ve installed the Android SDK. Click Androidand then Browse to select the location where you extracted the SDK files. For example, /opt/local/android-sdk.
  
  
  
  
• Click OK to have Eclipse save the location of your SDK.