I’ve been developing cross platform apps using HTML5 for deployment across Desktops, Tablets, and Phones. Lots of interesting apps can be built without talking to the hardware but sooner or later, we always want to go deeper. Mozilla is working Won an exciting “Web Runtime” ( read more here ) and there is a version of Firefox for Android.
Though I don’t want to build native Android Apps, I do want to get under the covers and experiment with building the Open Web Apps runtime components (it’s so cool working for an organization where EVERYTHING we build is open source and available for download WHILE it’s being developed.)
Since I hit a couple of snags getting things set up I though I’d share the steps that I used in the hopes that it would help someone else who is just getting started.
Though there are good commercial Java / Android Development tools available, the standard is to use Eclipse and the ADT, so that’s what I’ll be setting up in the steps below.
Eclipse is itself a Java App. On my Ubuntu machine the default Java Runtime was OpenJDK which is not recommended for running Eclipse.
So the first thing that we want to do is make sure that we have our Ubuntu system up to date, the latest version of the Java run-time and JDK installed and our Ubuntu box configured to use the Sun versions by default.
Start by opening up a terminal window.
Read more: MisfitGeek (Joe Stagner)
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