Shortly after my first hack day with Android development and the conclusion that I really like where the platform and development is going, I started to look at building Android application outside the Android Developer Toolkit in Eclipse. I started using IntelliJ IDEA for Android development in parallel as well as wanted to investigate command line and later continuous integration builds. It did not take me long to shy away from the Apache Ant based build and look around for a plugin for my trusted Apache Maven that would help me along the cause. I found the maven-android-plugin and quickly joined the effort.
I lead an initiative around getting the SDK shipped jar files needed for the plugin into the Maven central repository, but unfortunately we ran into legal red tape and logistic problems. Needing an alternative I created the maven-android-sdk-deployer that quickly got adopted by the community as the default tool for usage of the maven-android-plugin.
In parallel I ended up modifying wiki pages and tweeting about things. One thing led to another and I am now writing the Android chapter for the book Maven: The Complete Reference for the community. Special thanks go to Hugo Josefson from Jayway and Tim OBrien from Sonatype for their work on the plugin and the book. Along the line I am creating some new sample applications and builds as well as doing a little bit of plugin coding here and there. The work is done completely in the open on github:
I would very much appreciate if you send any requests or feedback my way.
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