Developers can now benefit from Facebook's trial and error building Android apps
Following lots of development time creating a new Android build tool to aid in development of its own Android apps, Facebook has decided to open-source it for other developers to use. Developed at a hack-a-thon last summer, the new build tool, named "Buck", was created to better address the needs of Facebook as it moved to making more native apps -- rather than just using WebViews -- for Android. The move to Buck from Ant in August of last year cut down build times for its apps dramatically, leaving no reason to continue using the old tools.
Because it improved the build times and overall development cycle for Facebook's project so notably, the engineers decided to also open-source it, making the entire code base available to check out from GitHub. According to Facebook, Buck will help most when developers are building apps with many small modules rather than just a few large ones. Development-minded folks among us can of course take a look at the tools themselves and see if it could work for their own project at the source link below.
Source: Facebook; GitHub
