Developer Friendly Android Libraries

         Developer-friendly Android Libraries

Hi Guys,
Here is my list of favorite libraries, which I believe can save you some precious time while developing applications and ensure they are good-looking and user-friendly and they will provide the best smartphone application experience to end users.

Rajawali:

Rajawali is a 3D engine for Android based on OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0. It can be used for normal apps as well as live wallpapers.

This is one of my favorites. As you know I am Android Applications and Games Developer I really recommend this one. If you are thinking of developing live wallpapers or 3D games, this library might be very handy. One can easily export the 3D models from tools like Blender and render them on the devices using openGLES with this library. Adding animations like rotation, or scaling on user events is a cakewalk

Download it here: https://github.com/MasDennis/Rajawali

ActionBar Sherlock:

This one deserves to be at the top of the list. Action-bar was introduced in API-11 of the Android SDK and the support library by Google does not provide a proper backport. 

The library will automatically use the native action bar when appropriate or will automatically wrap a custom implementation around your layouts. This allows you to easily develop an application with an action bar for every version of Android from 2.x and up. It works seamlessly with newer views such as NavigationDrawer, SlidingPaneLayout, Fragments, etc.

Download it here: http://actionbarsherlock.com
How to use: http://actionbarsherlock.com/usage.html

RoboGuice 2:

RoboGuice 2 smoothes out some of the wrinkles in your Android development experience and makes things simple and fun. Do you always forget to check for null when you getIntent().getExtras()? RoboGuice 2 will help you. Think casting findViewById() to a TextView shouldn’t be necessary? RoboGuice 2 is on it.RoboGuice 2 takes the guesswork out of development. Inject your View, Resource, System Service, or any other object, and let RoboGuice 2 take care of the details.RoboGuice 2 slims down your application code. Less code means fewer opportunities for bugs. It also makes your code easier to follow -- no longer is your code littered with the mechanics of the Android platform, but now it can focus on the actual logic unique to your application.

Download it here: https://github.com/roboguice/roboguice

GSON:

Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.This is a powerful and lightweight JSON parser, specifically for Android. If you have a Web-service returning JSON, use jsonschema2pojo.org  (or some other similar tool) to generate the POJOs, and with a single line of code, you can parse the JSON using this library. Use GSON along with ActiveAndroid and you can reduce the development time considerably.

Gson Goals:

1. Provide simple toJson() and fromJson() methods to convert Java objects to JSON and vice-versa
2. Allow pre-existing unmodifiable objects to be converted to and from JSON
3. Extensive support of Java Generics
4. Allow custom representations for objects
5. Support arbitrarily complex objects (with deep inheritance hierarchies and extensive use of generic types)

Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/

ActiveAndroid:

ActiveAndroid is an active record style ORM (object relational mapper). What does that mean exactly? Well, ActiveAndroid allows you to save and retrieve SQLite database records without ever writing a single SQL statement. Each database record is wrapped neatly into a class with methods like save() and delete(). This is a simple ORM solution for your applications. It is as easy as creating objects and saving them to the SQLite database. The setup of classes makes use of Java annotations. This saves a whole lot of time on configurations, and gives the developer more time to spend on the login than on the syntaxes. Once used, you will find it hard to live without it.

Download it here: https://github.com/pardom/ActiveAndroid

ViewPagerIndicator:

This is another cool library from the developer of Actionbar. It makes the viewpager more usable and enables easier navigation between fragments. Users have a clear idea of where they have navigated.
Features:

1. New IconPageIndicator! Uses state-list images to represent pages.
2. TabPageIndicator now supports icons via IconPagerAdapter interface.
3. Support android:background attribute on Canvas-based views.
4. Title indicator allows for drawing its line, underline, and/or triangle on top of the titles for placement underneath a ViewPager.
5. Tab indicator now supports ICS-style dividers (see styled sample).

Download it here: http://viewpagerindicator.com/

Crouton:

Crouton is a class that can be used by Android developers that feel the need for an alternative to the Context insensitive Toast.

A Crouton will be displayed at the position the developer decides. Standard will be the top of an application window. You can line up multiple Croutons for display, that will be shown one after another. It is nicely implemented and highly customizable. It gives your application a notification system which is cleaner and more aesthetic than native toasts, and is rightly named croutons.

Download it here: https://github.com/keyboardsurfer/Crouton

Universal Image Loader:

Handling large bitmaps does gives nightmares to many Android developers. The Universal Image Uploader is a lightweight library which saves you the effort of handling bitmaps and provides great support for caching images. One can easily figure out how to decode the bitmaps in the app. Definitely a lifesaver of a library.
Features:

1. Multithread image loading
2. Possibility of wide tuning ImageLoader's configuration (thread executors, downloader, decoder, memory and disc cache, display image options, and others)
3. Possibility of image caching in memory and/or on device's file system (or SD card)
4. Possibility to "listen" loading process
5. Possibility to customize every display image call with separated options
6. Widget support
7. Android 2.0+ support

Download it here: https://github.com/nostra13/Android-Universal-Image-Loader

AChartEngine:

This plots neat and elegant graphs in various styles. The javadocs might not be great, and it might not be all that easy to develop with only a few resources available and a large number of classes, but the output is definitely worth the effort.

Download it here: http://www.achartengine.org/

Robotium:

Robotium is an Android test automation framework that has full support for native and hybrid applications. Robotium makes it easy to write powerful and robust automatic black-box tests for Android applications. With the support of Robotium, test case developers can write function, system and acceptance test scenarios, spanning multiple Android activities. This is an automation testing framework for Android. Developers and testers can generate test cases and ensure that minor changes do not introduce new bugs. It might seem to be an overhead in the early stages of development but helps keep maintenance work easy.

Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/robotium/

ZXing:

ZXing ("zebra crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library implemented in Java, with ports to other languages.This quickly adds support for scanning bar codes in an Android application. Easy to configure and use. It has a high scanning efficiency.

Download it here: https://github.com/zxing/zxing OR http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

Tesseract:

Tesseract is probably the most accurate open source OCR engine available. Combined with the Leptonica Image Processing Library it can read a wide variety of image formats and convert them to text in over 60 languages. It was one of the top 3 engines in the 1995 UNLV Accuracy test. Between 1995 and 2006 it had little work done on it, but since then it has been improved extensively by Google.
Tesseract is a highly optimized optical character reader library available for Android. This is a cross-platform library and will require some basic knowledge of using NDK in an Android app.

Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

So these are my favorite developer friendly android libraries which are used in industry by many developers, I do use many of them and I listed them here by asking many of my friends who develops android apps & games that what they prefer to use.
If you think something is missing out of this list just point out I would love to include it as well.

    Hope this will help you guys a lot... Stay tuned for next article!