Third Party Custom Components

Question

As I am new to Android development, I did find the section for custom components. What I am interested in is to create custom components and make them available to other developers. Is there an article or information that covers the creation & deployment of third party components for Android?

Example:
Company "A" wants to use a custom component that I wrote. How do I go about getting it to them and that they can easily use it in there application development?

Thanks in advance!

Craig

Answer 1

Android applications are not that much different from java programs. In order to create your own library you can just create a jar out of it distribute this jar. To use it, one would have to include this jar in its code.

Using Eclipse, you can use the export function to create the jar. It's even possible to create jars out of Android projects, but in this case you would have to be careful not to include conflicting files (like AndroidManifest.xml) when creating the jar, or else your library would be useless for the end user.