Using Eclipse for Android Development

As you may know, Google stopped support for The Eclipse ADT plugin a couple years ago. They have a great IDE which is called “Android Studio” based on the IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains. And Google wants us to migrate our projects into it. However, there are two main drawbacks for me in switching to it from Eclipse. The first one is migrating an Eclipse project isn’t so smooth. I have to spend a lot of time for each project that I migrate. And the second one is the high system requirements of the Android Studio. It causes my computer to lag from time to time, which makes me nervous and ruins my concentration. So, I come up with a solution which includes using Eclipse and Android Studio as I need. I won’t migrate my Eclipse projects to Android Studio anymore, but when I start a new project I’ll prefer Studio.

I was using Eclipse ADT Bundle beforehand, but it became outdated after Google stopped supporting it. Here is how I made my own up-to-date Android development environment with Eclipse on a Windows computer.

  • Just download and install JDK.
  • Download Eclipse from here. I used Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers but you can prefer another one as you need.
  • Run Eclipse and close the welcome screen.
  • Go to Eclipse marketplace on your browser and download the ADT plugin. Actually there are more than one. I’ll go with Android Development Tools for Eclipse.
  • Drag ‘Install’ button to Eclipse workspace.
  • Follow the steps and wait until plugin is completely installed.
  • Eclipse might give a warning about unsigned content. If you see a screen mentioning that, choose ‘continue anyway’.
  • When the installation is completed, Eclipse will ask to restart.
  • After restart Eclipse will look for an SDK, if you have one installed, choose the correct path for it. Otherwise just follow the prompts. (If you want to install Android SDK standalone, go to this page and download it.)
  • It will be a long download/install process since it’ll update all necessary SDK build tools etc.

 

After that, your environment will be ready and up-to-date for developing Android apps. You can create new android project and run it. If you haven’t done it manually, eclipse will ask for an emulator.

 

Happy coding 😉

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