Announcing the Android Parcel Project

I am pleased (relieved? moderately chagrined?!?) to announce the first cut of the Android Parcel Project. The goal of the Project is to make code reuse in Android as easy as it is in Ruby (gems), Perl (CPAN), and so on. This, despite some of Android’s limitations on supporting such reuse.

As the Project’s home page says, there are a total of three steps to start reusing parcels for your Android project:

1. Install Ruby and RubyGems
2. Install the andparcel gem (e.g., sudo gem install andparcel)
3. parcel install name-of-my-parcel

This is all still fairly preliminary, and the site will get beefed up over the next few weeks with more material. And, of course, there are only four(!) parcels available for reuse right now, though I will be adding others of mine over time. If you would like to slap a parcel descriptor and your code in a ZIP file, you can be in the catalog as well – details of that process are forthcoming.

For now, read what the site has to offer, pay attention to this blog for further announcements, and perhaps join the cw-android Google Group to offer your feedback, suggestions, offers of help, and so forth.

My sincere hope is that we can build up a nice library of reusable code, simplifying Android development just a bit.