In the last chapter, we built Sunago, a social media aggregation application. In that chapter, we learned that Sunago is a JavaFX-based application that can pull posts, tweets, photos, and so on from a variety of social media networks and display them in one place. The application certainly provided a number of interesting architectural and technical examples, but the application itself could be more practical--we tend to interact with social networks from mobile devices such as phones and tablets, so a mobile version would be much more useful. In this chapter, then, we'll write an Android port, reusing as much of the code as possible.
Android applications, while built in Java, look quite a bit different than, say, a desktop application. While we can't cover every aspect of Android development, we'll cover enough in this chapter to get you started, including the following:
- Setting up an Android development environment
- Gradle builds
- Android views
- Android state...