RosJava & Android on Hydro

Hi all,

A quick javaland update. I know quite a few people have already dived in early with rosjava on hydro even though it hasn't actually bleeped on the ros news radar yet. 

This is finally that bleep to say that we're reasonably happy (and using it ourselves fairly actively) with the current state of the rosjava/android build environment for hydro and we'll endeavour to keep it stable 'as is' (apart from bugfixes) for the remainder of the hydro release.

So what is in the box?

• Partially Catkinized - each gradle super project is a catkin package
• You can now do entire workspace builds and CI with one command
• Ros Gradle Plugins: take alot of the repitition out of the build.gradle files
• Debs - you no longer need to build every stack to build your own sources
• A Maven Repo - you don't even need ros to access/build with the rosjava jars, just point to our maven repo on github.
• Messages - each package now compiles into its own jar (no superblob)

• Android Studio/Gradle - uses the new adt build environment from google
• IDE/Command Line/CI are now all compatible
• AAR's : takes advantage of the new .aar's for android libraries
• Partially Catkinized : can do entire workspace builds on these too.
• with .aar's we can really scale up now
• A Maven Repo : just point to this instead of having to build everything
• don't need to build any sources to build your single application anymore!

Places to look for documentation are at:

Cheers,

Daniel

PS A big thank you to Damon Kohler for assisting us in getting rosjava in better shape for hydro and also to the users who endured alot of rapid changes and gave great feedback early in the upgrade.

PPS What's coming for igloo? Expect a true rosjava message generator...somewhat awkwardly compiling rosjava messages is very quickly reaching an annoying threshold of unbearably biblical proportions!