2014-12-19

Eclipse ADT woes


Eclipse ADT woes

I have recently decided to update my Eclipse ADT development environment with the latest Google updates and SDK’s. Well, even though that process seem to complete flawlessly (thanks to SDK Manager) in reality my whole Eclipse installation has been damaged in such a way that I could not even possibly create a simple, one-activity application.

It appears that the problems are related to the SDK installation of Android and I’ve decided to dig into and try to find out what’s going on.

So, I install everything from scratch (adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20140702.zip) and do some tests to find out what occurred. My initial ADT Eclipse installation which I used to create, build and run apps without any problems includes the following:

o    Tools:

·   Android SKD Tools: Rev 23.0.2

·   Android SDK Platform-tools: Rev 20

·   Android SDK Build-Tools: Rev 20

o    Android 4.4W (API 20)

·   SDK Platform : API 20, Rev 1

o    Extras

·   Android Support Library: Rev 20

 

The issues are related to the latest (as of 2014 December 19th) Android SDK Tools, Platform tools, Build tools and the (famous) support library which are displayed below:

o    Tools:

·   Android SDK Tools, Rev 24.0.2

·   Android SDK Platform tools, Rev 21

o    Android 4.4W (API 20)

·   SDK Platform, Rev 2

o    Extras

·   Android Support Library, Rev 21.0.3

 

After installing these updates, Eclipse ADT fail to create and build apps correctly giving a wealth of different error messages (related to appcompat, R generated files, null pointers, etc.)

The only way to avoid all these issues is to AVOID the update and stick to the original API 20 or the API 19 release (Android 4.4.2 (API 19) SDK Platform, Rev 4).