I was thinking of building an app on android with Scala instead of the regular Java (or the equivalent I guess). Is it worth it? Any problems and unnecessary headaches?
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232answers:
3
A:
I have been trying to use Scala for Android, but couldn't found appropriate IDE. That was main issue. Existing NetBeans scala plugin is too buggy.
barmaley
2010-10-11 13:33:25
Was it buggy because of scala, or because of scala with android specifically? Scala works pretty well with IDEA. I never liked Eclipse or Netbeans personally
egervari
2010-10-11 13:45:50
Buggy Scala plugin for Netbeans. About IDEA support of SCALA never knew - I will try how it's
barmaley
2010-10-12 12:58:12
+10
A:
Working with Scala should be mostly painless, as the dex compiler just works with bytecode - which is exactly what Scala produces.
Your biggest problem then is the dependency on scala-library, as dex expects everything to be in a single Jar. This is best handled with Proguard (which will also remove unused code and give you a smaller executable, ideal for mobile)
Current best practice is to use SBT with the Android plugin; It'll take care of everything for you: http://github.com/jberkel/android-plugin
If you must use Eclipse and the plugin supplied by Google, then you're going to have a non-standard directory structure. I also wrote an article on how to deal with this: http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/scala-ide/Developing_for_Android
But be warned... it takes a lot more effort that way!
Kevin Wright
2010-10-11 14:22:36
The main problem is those library use reflection (something like myClass.getMethod()), because proguard can not detect them, you need declare to keep those class/function manually. And some library just hard to make it work with Scala/Proguard/Android, ex. gdata-java-client. Or you need some tweak to keep cenrtain files after proguard process the JAR, eg. ical4j. Otherwise, libraries usually could work with this combnation very easily.
Brian Hsu
2010-10-11 15:11:01
+3
A:
We discussed this at Scala Lift Off London last Friday and the consensus seemed to be that it generally works fine as long as you avoid Actors. Also, the sbt-android-plugin was highly recommended. Nathan Hamblen's blog has many posts on Android and the ones also tagged Scala have a lot of gotchas worth looking out for.
pr1001
2010-10-11 14:26:54
http://code.technically.us/post/824974287/rewiring-android-for-type-safe-layout-resources is a cool (if minor) advantage to programming for Android in Scala instead of Java.
Ken Bloom
2010-10-11 18:29:48