Generate Android image resources from SVG with Maven

I recently wrote the AndroidGenDrawable Maven plugin for Android that allow you to generate density specific PNG drawable from SVG (scalable vector graphics) at build time for your Android projects. Here is a brief presentation.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation is an actual problem when speaking of Android development. Specially when programmers need to maintain density specific raster graphics image (bitmaps) to target all of the possible Android device screens. The very first example is the Launcher icon of an Android application that should be resized depending on the generalized screen density (see link) :

ldpi generalized density

mdpi generalized density

hdpi generalized density

xhdpi generalized density

androidgendrawable-maven-plugin

The androidgendrawable maven plugin allow you to work on a unique SVG version of your assets and to generate the density specific PNG versions required by the Android runtime at build time. The SVG artwork are automatically scaled and transcoded to PNG for you during the maven build. The plugin rely on apache batik to transcode the SVG to PNG. You just have to add the plugin declaration and its configuration to your pom.xml :

<plugin>
 <groupId>fr.avianey.modjo</groupId>
 <artifactId>androidgendrawable-maven-plugin</artifactId>
 <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
 <configuration>
  <from>${project.basedir}/svg</from>
  <to>${project.basedir}/res</to>
  <rename>
   <level>icon</level>
  </rename>
  <createMissingDirectories>true</createMissingDirectories>
  <targetedDensities>
   <density>ldpi</density>
   <density>mdpi</density>
   <density>hdpi</density>
   <density>xhdpi</density>
  </targetedDensities>
  <fallbackDensity>mdpi</fallbackDensity>
  <skipNoDpi>true</skipNoDpi>
 </configuration>
 <executions>
  <execution>
   <phase>initialize</phase>
   <goals>
    <goal>gen</goal>
   </goals>
  </execution>
 </executions>
<plugin>

Required resources are then generated during the initialize phase of the Maven build :

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building level 1.0-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- androidgendrawable-maven-plugin:1.0-SNAPSHOT:gen (default) @ level ---
[INFO] Transcoding level-xhdpi.svg to drawable
[INFO] Transcoding level-xhdpi.svg to drawable-hdpi
[INFO] Transcoding level-xhdpi.svg to drawable-ldpi
[INFO] Transcoding level-xhdpi.svg to drawable-xhdpi

You can fork the plugin on github here and read the documentation on the associated github page here.

The Facebook Android API v3.0 on Maven

For those of you that might be interrested, I just created a Maven repository that hosts my Maven port of the Facebook Android API in its latest v3.0 version. You just need to reference the GitHub pages hosted repository in you Android Maven project pom.xml :

<repositories>  
  ...  
  <repository>  
    <id>The mavenized Facebook Android API</id>  
    <url>http://avianey.github.com/facebook-api-android-maven/</url>  
  </repository>  
</repositories>

...and to import the facebook-android-api as a dependency :

<dependencies>
  ...
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.avianey</groupId>
    <artifactId>facebook-android-api</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0</version>
    <type>apklib</type>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

I picked the groupId to avoid conflict with other ports one might find on the Internet. As usual, you can fork this mavenized Facebook Android API on GitHub.