Ketchup

Being surrounded by Open Source libraries when developing Android apps (in my mind I always hear ‘Open Sauce’ – once read never forgotten, ha.), I’ve always been trying to create a semi useful library and also learn more about the process behind getting your code up to a central repo so other dev’s can benefit from it.  When working on another library contribution, I came up with some code that I thought would be a good candidate.

Like most first timers I read a few different articles on the subject, and a lot of them left me more confused about the process then when I started!  Luckly thou I did find two articles, and one in paticular that gave a great step by step guide to getting your library published. Both articles can be found below

How to publish your open source library to Maven central ~> The first article was a great introduction & some good links to the process, but did leave me with a couple of questions around creating accounts and the reasons why I was doing things.

The Complete Guide to Creating and Publishing an Android Library ~>  The second article I found answered all the questions and I think should be the go-to guide for all new open source creators

The only tip I would give in relation to my experience of publishing the library (from the second guide above) is to use your own domain for the ‘Group’ when you add the details to the gradle.properties file.

i.e.

VERSION_NAME=0.0.1
VERSION_CODE=1
GROUP=uk.co.barbuzz

This allows you a bit of shameless self promotion every time someone includes your library and makes all the sharing worthwhile! 🙂

My first open source library is called ‘Beer Progress View’ and it helps anyone creating a beer related app to have a cool way of displaying progress and you can find it at the following place on GitHub ~> https://github.com/andyb129/BeerProgressView

You can also download a sample of the library in action on Google play below.

google_play_badge

I hope this helps a few more first timers start contributing to the great Open Sauce movement!