Thu, 22 December 2011
#legendofklang gets the #spiewakeffect Comments[2]
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- Hi guys, I'm not sure which of you that was talking about his experience with Scala on Android, but I was a bit surprised at how readily you brushed off the significance of Scala Android development issues.
I'm glad to hear that it's working well for you, but I presume you're not doing your development from within an IDE. How do you handle source-level debugging? You also make it sound as if the ProGuard step is simple, when it often involves learning another DSL that is painful to debug in its own right, and adds a very time consuming build step.
I've struggled to adopt Scala on Android while maintaining Eclipse as my IDE, but found it to be largely infeasible even to add a single Scala class to my existing project because it's difficult if not impossible to maintain the ability to perform source-level debugging and build within Eclipse.
When the recently resolved Scala compiler and Android SDK issues are released that people have been talking about so much on the lists, the ScalaIDE plugin for Eclipse should have no problem natively supporting Android without the need for running ProGuard during development.
The issues are not just limited to corner cases or advanced Scala users like extending the Scala collections library, even building the most trivial hello-world Scala Android app requires that ProGuard be run and it's tremendously difficult or impossible to perform source-level debugging.
I created a very simple project based off of the Android Notepad example that uses a single Scala class and demonstrates the difficulties in adopting Scala on Android within Eclipse. You can find it here if interested:
http://code.google.com/p/android-notes-list-with-scala-and-roboguice/
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