New Tools for Android Developers Arrive

This week, developers gained access to some notable Android-focused tools. The tools are arriving as Android continues to proliferate on smartphones and other devices, giving rise to a robust app ecosystem that now rivals Apple's. A group of tech industry titans has produced an open source benchmark for performance testing Android systems, and with the release of AIDE, developers can now produce Android applications and tools directly on Android devices.

You can find much more information on AIDE in this online interview, where its developers note:

"We want AIDE to become the foremost way to develop Android Apps in the future...Android places severe restrictions on memory usage for Apps. Still it is possible to build a project containing over 100,000 source lines like AIDE itself within AIDE on a Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone."

Notably, AIDE is compatible with projects started on Eclipse, which means that developers can mix creation of an application between a desktop computer and an Android device. The Register has more on AIDE here.

Meanwhile, a working group including engineers from ARM, Dell, Freescsale, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments has developed an open source benchmark to guage the performance of Android systems. According to EETimes:

"AndEBench scores integer performance of a basket of tasks both on the native Android environment and on its Dalvik Java virtual machine. The jobs include a mix of state machine routines, cyclic redundancy checks and matrix multiply operations, but no floating point tasks."

You can get AndEBench here, and find out much more about it. There is also a community forming around the benchmark, which you can get information on joining.