Open source software emerges when people work in unison to create something greater than any one of them could create on their own. While the result may always be a collective work, the contributions and sacrifices that make a project thrive are always individual. These contributions deserve recognition. Sonatype will be paying tribute to the members of the Java open source community, who dedicate themselves to improving these projects. We’ll do so by featuring them in our new Community Spotlight each month. This month’s spotlight is on Manfred Moser of simpligility technologies.

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

Manfred Moser – Kicking Apps and Taking Names

We have had the pleasure of working directly with Manfred Moser for the better part of a year and have been familiar with his work for much longer. Given Manfred’s constant and continuous work with the community we are sure many of you know him but for those that don’t, here is a little bit of background on Manfred.

Manfred has been professionally developing software in Java since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed open source fanatic, as well as an Android application developer, consultant, author and speaker. He has a long history of developing software in Internet, enterprise and mobile spaces. He is now working as an Android application developer and consultant with his own company, simpligility technologies.

simpligility technologies brings simplicity and agility to software development, processes, products and customers. With Manfred’s engineering background, teaching experience and passion for tools and infrastructure, he loves helping and mentoring other developers and development teams. He is able to understand complex requirements, business processes and software systems and cut through all the distractions to the core purpose and aim of an application. With this background simpligility offers a myriad of helpful consulting services.

We have been very lucky to work with Manfred on a number of projects. He is a core committer to the Android Maven Plugin and has co-authored our Sonatype book Maven: The Complete Reference, where he recently revamped the Maven Android chapter.  He is a Hudson committer and co-authored the new Hudson Book with Tim O’Brien.  Manfred is also a core contributor to our brand new Nexus Best Practices training course materials.

Manfred is the founder of the Vancouver Island Java User Group in Victoria, BC and in addition to presenting at java user group meetings, he has also presented at a number of conferences around the world. His next appearance will be at AnDevCon II in San Francisco this week from November 6 to 9, 2011.  If you plan to be there, we highly recommend popping into at least one of his sessions. The two sessions Manfred will be leading are: Taking Advantage of Apache Maven for Your Android Builds and Testing Android Apps – Going from Zero to Hero.

You can follow Manfred on twitter @simpligility or read the simpligility blog here.

We would like to thank Manfred for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Manfred!

If you already use Maven, developing a Android application isn’t going to be a stretch. There’s a very active community of open source projects for maven-droid development, and the Android SDK artifacts are available on Central.

You’ve probably noticed increased advertising for Google’s Android platform over the past few months. The mobile wars are heating up with the release of iPhone 4 and Android-based phones seem to be gaining market share at a rapid pace. Even if you don’t already develop for a mobile platform, you, your company, the organization you are a part of has started to have discussions about developing applications for these smart phones.

If you are thinking about mobile development with Maven, Here are some pointers to some great resources to get you started:

• Android SDK artifacts are now available in Central. This means that you can create a project and get started without having to manually install artifacts.
• Manfred Moser has some free sample code and Maven projects
• There is an active and rapidly developing m2eclipse Android plugin from Hugo Josefson and Ricardo Gladwell which adds Android support to m2eclipse.

If you are looking at mobile development, you’ve got two big choices: Apple’s iOS 4 or the Android platform. I’ve used both, I’m impressed with Apple’s tools: they have great APIs, XCode is a really capable tool, but learning a whole new set of tools does seem to be a high barrier for most developers. Droid does Maven, and because of that, there is a much lower barrier to experimentation.

When a technology connects with a tool like Maven, it opens up new possibilities for developers.

When I first downloaded the SDK for Android nearly a year ago, I was greeted by an ant build file. I wanted to start developing Android applications but wasn’t willing to go back to ant to do it; so I decided to throw together a quick set of plugins to build Android with Maven: MASA Plugins. The name MASA comes from PKD’s book We Can Build You. In the book, there is a company MASA Associates (Multiplex Acoustical System of America), responsible for building simulacra (or androids). PKD’s MASA is also a play on the word NASA, and as we all know, Maven is as simple as rocket science.

After starting, I found there was little documentation on how to use the command line to build Android apps, leading me to dissect the build.xml file to learn how the command line options worked.

After that, it was just a matter of creating a custom lifecycle for the packaging type ‘android:apk’. The plugins largely consisted of translating POM parameters to the command line, similar to Apache NMaven, undergoing incubation at the ASF.

A sample POM looks like:

<project>
   <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
   <groupId>org.jvending.masa</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-test</artifactId>
   <version>1.0.1</version>
   <packaging>android:apk</packaging>
   <name>maven-test</name>
   <dependencies>
      <dependency>
         <groupId>android</groupId>
         <artifactId>android</artifactId>
         <version>1.0</version>
      </dependency>
   </dependencies>
   <build>
      <sourceDirectory>src</sourceDirectory>
      <plugins>
         <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
               <source>1.5</source>
               <target>1.5</target>
            </configuration>
         </plugin>
         <plugin>
            <groupId>org.jvending.masa.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-dx-plugin</artifactId>
            <extensions>true</extensions>
         </plugin>
      </plugins>
   </build>
</project>

So by specifying the packaging type as ‘android:apk’ and the sourceDirectory as ‘src’, you can build your android project with Maven. If you type ‘mvn install -Dmasa.debug’ the plugins will also deploy the apk to the G1 device over USB or to the emulator.

For the latest SDK, I included the packaging type: ‘android:apk:platformTest’ that will deploy the apk to the device and run the unit tests on the target device.

At the time, the Android source was not open-source, so MASA provides a build script for importing the android.jar into the local repo. Now that Android is open-source, I’ll be looking to deploy the android.jar into the Maven repo to avoid this additional step and then getting a release of MASA deployed as well.

One area that I still need to work on is the delayed signing of apks, so expect to see future updates.