Using an android phone for development on the go

I'm always tinkering with new ideas, and sometimes I only have my phone with me. I played with ASE awhile back, but had a hard time typing much code 开发者_高级运维with the limited editor, and only dynamic languages were available then. I have seen touchqode, and I think it's a neat concept to be able to compile and run on a server.

Are there any usable toolsets for doing development directly on android? Particularly, it would be nice to see a basic android development environment entirely on android as the host.

Are there any usable toolsets for doing development directly on android?

You already rejected all of them in your answer. IOW, the only significant on-device development that I am aware of is SL4A (formerly known as ASE).

Note that with SL4A, you are not limited to it's own editor, so you might wish to poke around the Market and see if there's an editor that you like better.

Particularly, it would be nice to see a basic android development environment entirely on android as the host.

You are welcome to start porting the JDK and the Android build chain to ARM. This may take some time.

AIDE lets us compile apps from Android. Looks like it didn't take as long as some thought.

Things have changed, so I wanted to update my original question to reflect a better answer.

Considering the limitations of these devices I think it's wishful thinking to have a full-blown development environment. But SL4A + python is quite amazing. Not a toy. A small improvement to SL4A is to use the "Hackers keyboard" available from the market which can be customised to take much less vertical space than other keyboards. For me, this makes a large practical difference. Plus you can do the bulk of scripting from a computer: adb has a port forwarding option that integrates with the android python module and SL4A in server mode so that you can develop in a python environment on your pc but have the android stuff execute on your phone. You can also shell into the phone from adb and use vi to edit scripts. And then you can do tweaking from your phone, having done most of the scripting in a more comfortable environment.