Android and the Development Tool Market
Last week, Palm launched another salvo in the mobile OS wars with the beta release of Ares. Ares is not yet another mobile OS, but rather a browser-based IDE for building WebOS applications. It offers much of what you would expect to see in a desktop IDE for mobile development: debugging, drag-and-drop GUI editing, version control integration, live preview, etc. And, it is visually striking, looking much unlike the Visual Studios and Eclipses that dot the traditional tool landscape.
Ares gives WebOS sizzle where Android lacks it: development tools. Right now, your options are Eclipse with the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin, or Eclipse as the core of the MOTODEV Studio for Android. MOTODEV Studio for Android builds on top of the ADT, adding new wizards and tools for many facets of Android application development. Both are reasonably popular, the ADT somewhat more so because it comes with the Android SDK and is not perceived as being perhaps tied strictly to Motorola devices (hint: it’s not).
However, at the level of marketing copy, Ares still trumps them. ADT lacks the oft-requested drag-and-drop GUI building, and the preview mode is somewhat limited. While Eclipse probably fits better in corporate environments, developers also have to wade through various Eclipse-isms (e.g., umpteen zillion panes and perspectives), whereas Ares is exclusively focused on the issue at hand. If Ares is a hunting knife, ADT and MOTODEV Studio for Android are the bottle opener and corkscrew added to Eclipse’s “Swiss army knife”. And if I’m after wild boar on an island inhabited by smoke monsters, I’ll take the hunting knife, please.
Of course, I am a lousy judge. I generally eschew general-purpose IDEs, Eclipse in particular, because they perpetually get in my way and add insufficient value in return. However, even I would be inclined to give an Ares-esque tool a shot, hoping that its focus would allow it to give me a hand while not making my life more difficult as a side-effect.
Also, building an IDE is hard. I wrote one myself in the late 1990’s and can speak from first-hand experience. I get the sense that neither the ADT team nor the MOTODEV Studio for Android team are vast, and they probably have other things to do as well. Combine that with the unique challenges a layout manager-based interface puts on GUI builders — witness how long it took to get drag-and-drop GUI editing for Swing in NetBeans, for example — and I am worried that, for traditional Java-based Android development, the status may remain quo for some time to come.
That being said, I do expect some more innovation in this area, but perhaps in support of alternative tools for creating Android applications. MobiForms has their development tools for their cross-platform application framework. I could see Appcelerator Titanium Mobile or PhoneGap eventually spawning an Ares-like tool, since they, like WebOS itself, are Web-based frameworks. And if Flash someday becomes a first-class application environment for Android, you will have many existing Flash (and perhaps Flex) development tools at your disposal.
Once upon a time, development tools, particularly open source ones, were high-profile projects. And while the steam appears to have leaked out of that particular calliope, I suspect that the new wave of mobile development will spark a new wave of development tools to match. I can only hope Android will catch a bit of that wave.
