Android SDK Setup

[ppyordanov]

Android SDK needs to be installed as a standalone package in order to be able to build PhoneGap/ Cordova projects from sources for the relevant operating system.

[ppyordanov]

Android SDK has been installed. Here are some issues that I have documented in case they occur during system configuration (Windows OS):

• nodeJS is a library requirement in order to install Phonegap
  • Microsoft's Visual Studio is required in order to run nodeJS; when installing nodeJS v0.10.33 it would not recognize the Visual Studio package; reinstalling the library and rebooting fixed the issue
• after installing the android SDK, when trying to open the SDK manager directly from command line there were some path issues:

>android -version

Error: Unable to access jarfile lib\archquery.jar
Invalid path
Access is denied.
ERROR: SWT folder '' does not exist.
Please set ANDROID_SWT to point to the folder containing swt.jar for your platform.

Those were resolved by editing the android.bat executable script file and explicitly declaring the path to the java.exe executable:

rem Check we have a valid Java.exe in the path.
set java_exe="%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe"
if not defined java_exe goto :EOF

However, the manager could not still access the archquery.jar file and this is what was the most time consuming part and took quite a lot of research as there are many different options to try and solve it. What worked at the end for me was to give it the explicit relative path to the file:

rem Set SWT.Jar path based on current architecture (x86 or x86_64)
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('"%java_exe%" -jar lib\archquery.jar') do set swt_path=lib\x86

• to make PhoneGap create a new project SDK version 19 was installed as the application was configured not to use the latest one (that I had installed); however this can be reconfigured from _androidparser.js which is normally under '%APPDATA%\npm' nodeJS installation folder:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="10" android:targetSdkVersion="19" ... />

• resolving those issues resulted in successful project creation:

>phonegap create phonegap

Creating android project...

Creating Cordova project for the Android platform:

        Path: platforms\android

        Package: com.phonegap.helloworld
        Name: Hello World
        Android target: android-19
Copying template files...
Project successfully created.

Also installed Apache Ant to enable PhoneGap to build the project:

>ant -version
Apache Ant(TM) version 1.9.4 compiled on April 29 2014

Then tested building the new project:

>phonegap platform add android
>phonegap build
[phonegap] executing 'cordova build'...
[phonegap] completed 'cordova build'

[ppyordanov]

This task is relevant to #50 .

[ppyordanov]

This task has been completed and can be closed now.