Alternatives

While most of our efforts revolve around advanced features in the Eclipse plug-ins, you can develop Android applications using many other tools -- Maven, IntelliJ, NetBeans, etc. Soon there will be a link on the main developer site with more information on this.

The Android Developer Tools project is deliberately trying to support other IDEs and tools. We have extracted several core parts of the ADT plug-ins into IDE-neutral libraries such that they are suitable for reuse elsewhere.

In particular, these are:

ddms: The code to talk to a Dalvik instance (which lets your tool run applications on phones and in the emulator, etc) has been extracted into ddmlib, which has no Eclipse, SWT or even UI dependencies. All the SWT-based user interface code is in the separate ddmuilib.
layoutlib: The code to render a layout XML file into an image (which is useful to GUI builders) is in the standalone layoutlib library. It is accessed through the standard layoutlib_api.jar
ide_common: We are migrating a lot of code to handle resources (e.g. resolution of resource reference like @drawable/foo, compute the actual value taking screen configuration, themes etc into account) into this library.

Our goal is to provide Eclipse-based tools, while enabling other vendors to provide first-class Android support in their tools. If there are other portions you'd like to see isolated, please let us know. See our feedback page to see how.