Developing Mobile Applications Part 1

Sorry it's been awhile! I've been busy trying to get a number of personal and not so personal projects out of the way!
Recently, however, my brother in law was talking to me about developing some mobile applications for the blackberry, iphone and android, so I began doing some research into this.
Amongst the things I have discovered:

• the programming code required / used is mainly html, css, javascript, xml, flash and c# - most of which (except the c#) I already know as a website designer! The difference is that a mobile application is packaged differently
• there are several programs that can be used to develop / package the applications, including some I was already familiar with: the adobe suite (specifically dreamweaver, flash builder, air, flash pro, etc. - although I do not have the version that can compile what I design as a mobile application), eclipse (either on it's own or with rhomobile or JBoss).

So I decided to start with developing an android application. I began with both eclipse on it's own (using this tutorial: youtube - Programming for Android, Part 1, Installing everything you need by TZCoder) and in combination with rhomobile (following this tutorial: rhostudio tutorial - installation and developing an application)

Look at the requirements for each below (this list is not complete and only goes as far as I understand it and will be updated as I learn more about each):

	Eclipse stand alone	Rhomobile & Eclipse	JBoss & Eclipse
Opperating System (development)	Windows, Linux and Macintosh (regular PC and server with desktop environment)	Windows and Macintosh (regular PC and server with desktop environment)	Windows, Linux and Macintosh (server with desktop environment only?)
Platforms & Software to install	Java Runtime Environment (JRE), Java Development Kit (JDK), Android SDK, Eclipse, Android Eclipse Plugin	Rhostudio, Eclipse, Java Development Kit (JDK), SDK's (software development kits) for each mobile device you wish to develop for	Java 6.0 (Java SDK 1.6) Maven 3 JBoss Application Server 7.1 Getting started with JBoss AS JBoss Tools 3.3 (optional) JBoss Tools and JBoss AS Setup
Mobile Devices Supported	Android, Blackberry	Android, Blackberry, Iphone, Ipad, Windows mobile, Symbian, etc.
Programming Language	html, xml, css, javascript	ruby, html, xml, css, javascript
Types of Applications each can develop	static	dynamic, content management
Server Side Software required for public use		ruby, cloud based

At the time of this original writing I had only done one mobile application (HelloWorld) in eclipse stand alone and two related ones had been begun in rhomobile and eclipse.

It is important to note here that after following the youtube tutorial linked above (for the HelloWorld eclipse stand alone mobile application for android), I now had to figure out how to export the HelloWorld project as an .apk file. To do this, I followed the instructions here and here, and to my surprise, I was successful on the first try although mind you I had not done anything outside of the tutorial script wise.