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I am looking to use Transfuse DI for Android over Dagger and other similar frameworks. Searching Google it seems Transfuse does not have as an active community of users as other DI frameworks. Do people use Transfuse? Is it actively maintained/supported/enhanced?

Want to make sure I am expending effort on the right framework.

Thanks in advance.

John Ericksen
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user3521637
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1 Answers1

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I'm glad you are looking before you leap into the frameworks and libraries that you will use in your project. I fear that many people just follow the herd and blindly use the most popular projects without considering their needs or truly assessing the frameworks/libraries they use.

By the way, I'm the main author and maintainer of Transfuse.

Transfuse, currently, does not have as large of a community as some of its competitors including Dagger, Android Annotations, or Roboguice. This is most likely because of a few points I brought up on a forum post recently:

  1. I'm not aggressively advertising it at conferences and such.
  2. Transfuse isn't officially backed by a company. I started Transfuse because I had an idea about how Android applications could be better in a way that was not developed yet (Roboguice and Android Annotations were the popular projects when I started Transfuse) and I followed that dream. What you see today is purely the result of my passion for it and open source... Transfuse is not my day job, unfortunately.
  3. Transfuse wasn't born out of Google like Dagger.
  4. Transfuse is a bit harder to pick up because you really need a deep understanding of Android to appreciate it. It's not for noobies, and I think that may hurt adoption.

Transfuse, as you may have noticed, is largely different that than the frameworks mentioned above. Yes, they all share the same goal of reducing boilerplate, but Transfuse takes a very different approach.

All that being said, Transfuse is still a passion of mine and I love hearing from people about their experiences and making sure Transfuse works for them. If you're interested, and why wouldn't you be if you're asking this question, I urge you to give it a shot.

So, the short answer is: Yes. Transfuse is actively being maintained, supported and enhanced.

John Ericksen
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  • Thanks for the detailed response John. Transfuse looks neat, I am going to give it a go! I am using Android Studio with Gradle so will see how the setup goes - usually the hardest part of a project. – user3521637 Jan 26 '15 at 02:41
  • John followed your gradle example here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17665440/android-studio-with-transfuse however getting an error in Studio: Default Activity Not Found. Any ideas? – user3521637 Jan 26 '15 at 03:05
  • Hmm, not sure. Here's an example gradle project that works for me: https://github.com/johncarl81/transfuse/tree/master/examples/gradle – John Ericksen Jan 26 '15 at 16:33
  • @user3521637, and I think it's great that you're giving Transfuse a try. Feel free to post on the google group, github issues, here (Stack Overflow) or email me if you have any questions. – John Ericksen Jan 26 '15 at 23:12
  • Thanks for the offer of answering any questions. I have just pulled inyour example into Android Studio I am facing the same problem when I run the build I get the error: 'Default Activity Not Found'. I think its related to the fact that I have the Main class and transfuse automagically generates and sets the manifest to MainActivity and this is what it can't seem to find. – user3521637 Jan 29 '15 at 00:43
  • Hmm, Im not sure, does the manifest exist under src/main?. do you have androidManifestFile variant.processResources.manifestFile declared in your gradle.build file? – John Ericksen Jan 29 '15 at 16:19
  • Unfortunatley I am not getting out of the starting blocks and so I may have to drop Transfuse :(. I think the issue is down to not being able to find the transfuse generated Main activity. In the following ticket: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17665440/android-studio-with-transfuse you make this statement: 'Finally you probably want to add the source/apt_generated/debug or source/apt_generated/release folders as source folders under the project configuration.' I think this is related - but I can't work out how to add these as source folders in studio, any ideas? – user3521637 Jan 30 '15 at 02:20
  • Hmm, not sure, Android Studio works pretty well for me, but I typically rely on a maven or gradle build for the heavy lifting. You can always turn off manifest management by adding the property and adding the property transfuseManifestProcessing=off and adding the generated Activities by hand. – John Ericksen Jan 30 '15 at 05:47
  • Upon review, Im not sure how to add the generated soruces to Android Studio. I typically use Intellij IDEA, which allows you to do this under the Project Structure dialog. That may help with your issue. BTW, why is this a showstopper for you? Are you trying to deploy out of A-Studio directly? – John Ericksen Jan 30 '15 at 05:58
  • I am not going to deploy directly through AS however I am using this for my dev/test cycle and it is limiting unfortunatley. – user3521637 Feb 07 '15 at 15:25