Android Maven Plugin 4.0.0 ships

I can’t believe how time flies. The Android Maven Plugin’s first commits happened in 2008 shortly after the Android Beta release. My first commits are from October 2009. That was when Android 1.6 was new and shiny. Since then a lot has happened in the Android ecosystem and everyone, including your grandma, knows about Android. For the Android Maven Plugin and my involvement the same applies and now it is time to celebrate our 4.0.0 release.

Over time my commitment to the project grew,starting at version 2.2.1, and I ended up writing more and more code, working on the site and documentation and later merging pull requests, handling releases since 3.3.2 and generally managing the project.

All of the success and usage of the Android Maven Plugin would of course have been impossible without all the help from the community. Over 100 committers have contributed to the codebase so far and many, many more people and companies out there are using the plugin to produce their applications.

The plugin has has gathered a very large feature set going way beyond mere application development including things such as deploying and running applications on all attached devices, executing integration tests, performing analysis with lint or emma or running uiautomator and many others. The SDK as well as the NDK are supported and you can create apklib archives, the new Android archives (aar) and of course Android applications.

With the new 4.0.0 release we now have a solid support for the aar format and done a number of important changes:

• the project code has moved to the simpligility organization on github to allow easier management
• a group of core committers has full access to manage the project
• the groupId has changed to com.simpligility.maven.plugins
• the NDK support has been moved to the new android-ndk-maven-plugin to separate that concern and make the project more manageable
• the example applications have all migrated into the plugin codebase and a run as integration tests as part of the CI build
• the documentation has started the migration from the google code site to documentation written in asciidoc format and github hosted pages

All of these changes show that as usual there is lots more to do and we have some great plans going forward carrying on that work. But that is for another day to take care of!

Today I just want to celebrate, let you all know about this great release and thank you all for the all the cooperation and fun we had in the past. As usual check out the release notes for more info…

I am looking forward to more releases and more great open source hackery and community work.

Cheers and congratulations to you all.

Manfred