Developing a native Android App using Groovy

Simple Android app using Groovy.

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Many of us Java developers have been curious about being able to develop native android app using groovy for a long time. This topic has been discussed in stackoverflow for years. In GR8Conf Europe this year, Cédric Champeau showed Groovy Support for Android starting Groovy 2.4. In this post we will build a simple Android app using groovy.

Create a new Android app using Android Studio (0.8.6 was the latest version at the time of writing). 1-create

Edit the “build.gradle” of your “app” module and add the following:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        jcenter()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:0.12.2'
        classpath 'me.champeau.gradle:gradle-groovy-android-plugin:0.3.0'
    }
}

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

apply plugin: 'me.champeau.gradle.groovy-android'

3-build-gradle

You will need to add groovy as a dependency as well.

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    compile 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy:2.4.0-beta-3'
}

With these changes you now can start using groovy. Let’s rename the Activity “.java” to “.groovy” file. Here is the content of the activity file that is written in groovy

package com.manijshrestha.groovydroidexample

import android.app.Activity
import android.os.Bundle
import android.widget.TextView
import groovy.transform.CompileStatic

@CompileStatic
public class DroidActivity extends Activity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_droid);

        String messageText = "Hello Groovy!";
        def message = findViewById(R.id.message) as TextView
        message.text = messageText;
    }

}

4-Groovy Activity

You can build and deploy the app on your device.

5-screenshot

You can checkout the project in github. https://github.com/manijshrestha/GroovyDroidExample

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