P r o W o r l d Technology Development of Android Apps

1. Introduction

What is Android?
Android is an open source and Linux-based Operating System for mobile
devices such as smart phones and tablet computers. Android was developed by
the Open Handset Alliance, led by Google, and other companies.
The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin applications
on the Android platform using the Java programming language.
The first beta version of the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) was
released by Google in 2007, whereas the first commercial version, Android 1.0,
was released in September 2008. On June 27, 2012, at the Google I/O
conference, Google announced the next Android version, 4.1 Jelly Bean.
The source code for Android is available under free and open source software
licenses. Google publishes most of the code under the Apache License version
2.0 and the rest, Linux kernel changes, under the GNU General Public License
version 2.

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Features of Android
Android is a powerful operating system which supports great features. Few of
them are listed below:

Features Description

Android OS screen provides a beautiful and interactive

Beautiful UI
user interface.
It also provides various connectivity techniques like
Connectivity
GSM, CDMA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and WiMAX.
SQLite, a lightweight relational database, is used for data
Storage
storage purposes.
Android has native support for multi-touch which was
Multi-touch initially made available in handsets such as the HTC
Hero.
User can jump from one task to another and same time
Multi-tasking
various applications can run simultaneously.

Resizable Widgets are resizable, so users can expand them to show

widgets more content or shrink them to save space

Messaging SMS and MMS

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Android API
Name Version Number API Level

No name 1.0 1

Petit Four 1.1 2

Cupcake 1.5 3

Donut 1.6 3

Eclair 2.0 - 2.1 5-7

Froyo 2.2 - 2.2.3 8

Gingerbread 2.3 - 2.3.7 9-10

Honeycomb 3.0 - 3.2.6 11-13

Ice-cream Sandwich 4.0 - 4.0.4 14-15

Jelly Bean 4.1 - 4.3.1 16-18

KitKat 4.4 – 4.4.4 19

Lollipop 5.0 - 5.1.1 21-22

Marshmallow 6.0 – 6.0.1 23

Naugat 7.0-7.1.2 24-25

O 8.0 26

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2. Application Components

Key Terms
1. SDK (Software Development Kit): A set of tools and libraries that allow
the user to create an application based on a product.
2. IDE (Integrated Development Environment): A software application that
consists of a source code, editor, a compiler, build automation tools and a
debugger. It makes programming and running application easier.
3. ADT (Android Development Tools): A plugin for eclipse that extends the
Eclipse IDE by providing more tools to develop Android Applications.
4. AVD (Android Virtual Device): An android emulator that allows to
simulate how the application will run on an actual android device.
5. JDK (Java SE Development Kit): A popular Java SDK that is used to
program Android Application.

Components
There are following four main components that can be used within an Android
application:
Components Description
They dictate the UI and handle the user interaction to
Activities
the smart phone screen.
They handle background processing associated with
Services
an application.
They handle communication between Android OS
Broadcast Receivers
and applications

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Content Providers They handle data and database management issues.

 Activities
An activity represents a single screen with a user interface. For example,
an email application might have one activity that shows a list of new
emails, another activity to compose an email, and one for reading emails.
If an application has more than one activity, then one of them should be
marked as the activity that is presented when the application is launched.
An activity is implemented as a subclass of Activity class as follows:

public class MainActivity extends Activity

{

 Services
A service is a component that runs in the background to perform long-
running operations. For example, a service might play music in the
background while the user is in a different application, or it might fetch
data over the network without blocking user interaction with an activity.
A service is implemented as a subclass of Service class as follows:

public class MyService extends Service

{

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 Broadcast Receivers
Broadcast Receivers simply respond to broadcast messages from other
applications or from the system. For example, applications can also
initiate broadcasts to let other applications know that some data has been
downloaded to the device and is available for them to use, so this is
broadcast receiver who will intercept this communication and will initiate
appropriate action. A broadcast receiver is implemented as a subclass of
BroadcastReceiver class and each message is broadcasted as an Intent
object.
public class MyReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver
{

 Content Providers
A content provider component supplies data from one application to
others on request. Such requests are handled by the methods of the
ContentResolver class. The data may be stored in the file system, the
database or somewhere else entirely. A content provider is implemented
as a subclass of ContentProvider class and must implement a standard
set of APIs that enable other applications to perform transactions.

public class MyContentProvider extends ContentProvider

{

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Android Widgets

There are given a lot of android widgets such as Button, EditText,

AutoCompleteTextView, ToggleButton, DatePicker, TimePicker, ProgressBar
etc.

 Android Button: This one of the most used components. It can be pressed
by a user and when pressed we can launch
 Android Toast: Displays information for the short duration of time.
 Custom Toast: Displays a customize the toast, such as we can display
image on the toast.
 ToggleButton: It has two states ON/OFF.
 CheckBox: It displays different checkboxes from which one can select
multiple options.
 AlertDialog: AlertDialog displays a alert dialog containing the message
with OK and Cancel buttons.
 Spinner: Spinner displays the multiple options, but only one can be
selected at a time.
 RatingBar: RatingBar displays the rating bar.
 DatePicker: Datepicker displays the datepicker dialog that can be used to
pick the date.
 TimePicker: TimePicker displays the timepicker dialog that can be used
to pick the time.
 ProgressBar: ProgressBar displays progress task.
 ImageView: This component is used to show an image on the screen. The
image we want to show can be placed inside our apk or we can load it
remotely.

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ArrayAdapter

 ArrayAdapter (Context context, int resource)

 ArrayAdapter (Context context, int resource, int textViewResourceId)

 ArrayAdapter (Context context, int resource, T[] objects)

 ArrayAdapter (Context context, int resource, int textViewResourceId, T[]

objects)

 ArrayAdapter (Context context, int resource, List<T> objects)

 ArrayAdapter (Context context, int resource, int textViewResourceId,

List<T> objects)

Parameters

Context Context: The current context.

Resource int: The resource ID for a layout file containing a

TextView to use when instantiating views.

textViewResourceId int: The id of the TextView within the layout resource to

be populated

Objects T: The objects to represent in the ListView.

Objects List: The objects to represent in the ListView.

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Layouts
When one create an app some special features are used which act as a container.
These special views control how other components are placed on the
smartphones screen. Android provides a collection of Layout Managers and
each of them implements a different strategy to hold, manage and place its
components. From the API point of view, all the Layout managers derive from
the ViewGroup class. There are some layouts that place the components
horizontally or vertically, and others that implement a different strategy.
Android provides several standard layout managers:

• Linear Layout: This is the simplest Layout manager. This layout disposes
its components vertically or horizontally depending on the orientation
parameter. The orientation attribute is the most important attribute
because it determines how views are placed. It can assume two values
that are horizontal or vertical.
• Table Layout: This is layout manager that disposes its components in a
table, grouping them in rows and columns.
• Relative Layout: This is the most flexible layout in Android. This layout
manager uses a policy where the container places its Views relative to
other Views. We can implement, using this layout manager, very
complex UI structures.
• Frame Layout: FrameLayout is a special layout that we will cover in
more detail later. We saw different layout manager that implements some
specific strategies to place views on the UI. FrameLayout is used when
we want to display dynamically a view. It is very useful when we use
Fragments.

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• Grid Layout: It is very similar to TableLayout and it was introduced since

Android 4.0. This layout manager disposed its views in a grid form, but
respect to the TableLayout it is easier to use. GridLayout divides the
screen area into cells. Its children occupy one or more cells.

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3. Creating Android Application

Steps to Create an Android App

a) Setup the development environment
 Install Eclipse
 Install Android SDK (Android libraries)
 Install ADT plugin (Android Development Tools)
 Create AVD (Android Virtual Device)

b) Create a new Android project in Eclipse

The first step is to create a simple Android Application using Eclipse
IDE. Follow the option: File -> New -> Project and finally select
Android New Application wizard from the wizard list. Now name the
application as HelloWorld using the wizard window as follows:

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Once the project is successfully created one will see the following window:

Android application contains different files such as java source code, string
resources, images, manifest file, apk file etc which are shown in following
figure:

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 Java Source: This contains the .java source files for project. By default,
it includes MainActivity.java source file having an activity class that runs
when the app is launched using the app icon.
 Generated R.java: This contains the .R file, a compiler-generated file
that references all the resources found in the project. One should not
modify this file.
 Bin: This folder contains the Android package files .apk built by the
ADT during the build process and everything else needed to run an
Android application.

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 res/drawable-hdpi: This is a directory for drawable objects that are

designed for high density screens.
 res/layout: This is a directory for files that define app's user interface.
 res/values: This is a directory for other various XML files that contain a
collection of resources, such as strings and colors definitions.
 AndroidManifest.xml: This is the manifest file which describes the
fundamental characteristics of the app and defines each of its
components.

c) Run the created project in the emulator

One has to created an AVD while doing environment setup. To run the
app from Eclipse, open one of the project's activity files and click Run
icon from the toolbar. Eclipse installs the app on AVD and starts it and if
everything is fine with setup and application. It will show the following
window:

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