I am a fan of Android studio since it came out as alpha stage and made a switch early on. Since then I have not opened Eclipse once. The reason that I made the switch because of the stability issues.
I was seeing a lot of shit posting about Eclipse lately. So I got curious about the current stage of Eclipse and Android development. So I just installed Eclipse and tried it out.
tl;dr Eclipse was no go for Android development (at least for me) because couldn’t properly set up the project.
Firstly I tried to run an existing project without looking for any external help. The reason with it was to see how easy to set up Eclipse with Android project. So I downloaded Eclipse Photon. From my previous knowledge I know that I had to install Eclipse plugin. I went ahead to the Eclipse marketplace to check out ADT for Eclipse. Last update date was 2018–04–24 14:40 so it gave me hope that I would get a project working.
After installing the plugin I tried to import a small Android Studio project. First I tried “Existing Android Code Into Workspace”. After I see this window I concluded that this option wont work.
So I pressed back at the import dialog and selected Existing Gradle Project this time. This time I think I some how succeeded to import. Since the project was old project needs to be updated to the right library and tool versions I decided to revisit Android Studio to do those changes and then import the project again to Eclipse. After an import without any error messages I ended up two folders in the workspace.
After the import I tried the project I tried to run the app. But I couldn’t run it as an Android Application. So I wrote a gradle script to run the app on device after build and install. Which was good enough for me because I can now write code, build it, install it on a device and run the app.
The first thing I looked at is the layout editor. It had a message saying “The project target is not set. Right click project, choose Properties | Android.”. But I couldn’t find the suggested setting. While I was looking for other options I encountered with good old “Java Build Path” under project properties. I realized that source folders are not added. After I added them manually I got errors like “The import android.support cannot be resolved” that told me that Gradle dependencies are not recognized. I tried to fix these problems trying all sorts of stuff including downloading 3rd part Gradle plugins but no avail.
I eventually gave up and tried to look for help online. I couldn’t find anything to solve my problems or a tutorial to import an Android Studio to Eclipse. So I gave up trying to import an existing project. I thought it might be a good idea to give starting a new project a try. I will cover it in another post.
