Positronic Net Documentation

Basic Setup

As is unfortunately common with development tooling, developing with Positronic Net and its tool stack (sbt and the sbt android plugin) involves downloading several pieces, and getting them in shape. I’ll start with instructions for getting things in place (tested on Linux, should also work on Mac):

• Download and install the Android SDK, per instructions.

  Note that in addition to the API “starter package” itself, you will also need to use the android tool to download the API and platform versions you want to use. (The library and sample apps are built against version 7, also known as Android 2.1 and Eclair, which captures most of the current installed base.)

  However, Eclipse and the Eclipse plugin are not required.

• Set the ANDROID_SDK_HOME environment variable to point to the location where you put the SDK. (You may wish to put this in your .bashrc, or some similar file, so it automatically happens on login.)

    ~/src$ export ANDROID_SDK_HOME=/home/.../android-sdk-...
  

• Download and install sbt version 0.11.1 or better, per instructions.

• Download and install the Positronic Net library itself:

    ~/src$ git clone https://github.com/rst/positronic_net.git
    ~/src$ cd positronic_net
    ~/src/positronic_net$ sbt publish-local
  

If you’re downloading one of the sample apps, or trying to build one of your own, that’s enough to get started. If you’re going through the tutorial, though, you’ll probably want its sample code as well, you’ll probably want to download its sample code:

    ~/src$ git clone https://github.com/rst/positronic_tutorial_todo.git
    ~/src$ cd positronic_tutorial_todo
    ~/src/positronic_tutorial_todo$ sbt android:package-debug
  

will build a package in the positronic_tutorial_todo/target directory, and if the emulator is already running, the following (oddly named) incantation will load and start the app:

    $ sbt android:start-emulator
  

Or, of course, you can install it with adb install as per usual.

(Note that the tutorial walks you through the development of multiple versions. The version you get above is the one from the tutorial front page; all versions are available as the branches named phase1, phase2, phase3 and so forth.)

And, if you’re proceeding with the tutorial, you probably want to follow the link below to get started: