MyNotes: Fruit Based Libraries

As you might have noted from the last commits, I brought in the Guava library.  There are two schools of thought on Guava with Android:  Do it or Avoid at all cost.

I am ambivalent on the subject.

I don't like bringing in large libraries because they push your app towards the dreaded 65k method limit.  Android has provided ways to mitigate the issue, but I don't like getting close to it. Guava is a big library and that has to be take into consideration.

On the other hand, I don't have the time or resources to reinvent the wheel or keep it turning when it comes to the functionality that Guava gives me.

After waffling for awhile, I decided to include Guava.  This means that I will need to use Proguard ot shrink the library to only those classes that I am using.  It also means I have to be more careful in my release testing to make sure the Proguard minimazation works and that I am not including more of Guava than I need.

To bring in Guava with Gradle, you need to add MavenCentral as a valid repository and then add the dependency.  It ends up looking like this:

allprojects {
    repositories {
        jcenter()
        mavenCentral()
    }
}
...

dependencies {
    compile group: 'com.google.guava', name: 'guava', version: '18.0'

   .... other dependencies....
}

I also need to add a new file into the projects called progurard-guave.pro and add that to the release building portion of gradle:

buildTypes {
  release {
    minifyEnabled true

    // Library specific proguard files
    proguardFiles 'proguard-guava.pro'

    //Default proguard file
    proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
  }
}

Just an FYI:  do not trust the contents of proguard-guava.pro yet.  I am saving the real work on the file for later once the development is done.

Commits

You can find the changes for this entry among the commit at https://github.com/fsk-software/mynotes/commit/a89a3c2d74d7bb5aeff7520a38d417a8ec05a9e3.