Book Image

Android Development Tools for Eclipse

By : Khirulnizam Abd Rahman, Sanjay Shah

Book Image

Android Development Tools for Eclipse

By: Khirulnizam Abd Rahman, Sanjay Shah

Overview of this book

<p>The increase in Android's popularity with every passing day cannot be understated. This has resulted in a large programmer base willing to contribute to its success. Eclipse has a powerful IDE and has been adopted widely by programmers across the globe. The focus of ADT is to use existing familiar territory and ease development of Android applications. In this sense, ADT provides a one stop solution for Android application development.</p><p>Android Development Tools for Eclipse is a step-by-step guide that provides you with hands-on, practical, and to the point discussion and steps for using Eclipse tools for developing, debugging, and signing Android applications for distribution. It also teaches you to incorporate advertisements to monetize your applications. Every concept and its usage has been demonstrated in this book by implementing them via real world applications.</p><p></p><p>Android Development Tools for Eclipse starts with the installation of ADT, and then discusses important tools before guiding you through Android application development from scratch, demonstrating different concepts and implementation before finally helping you distribute your applications in the Android market. You will start the development of your first application, explore project structure, and add different widgets including multimedia ones.</p><p></p><p>You will learn everything about developing, debugging, testing, distributing, and monetizing your Android application using Eclipse ADT.</p>

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Installing Eclipse, ADT, and SDK

1. Installing Eclipse, ADT, and SDK

Introducing the Android platform

What is Android?

Preparing for Android development

Linking the Android SDK to the Eclipse

2. Important Features of the IDE

2. Important Features of the IDE

Project explorer

Graphical user interface designer

Properties window

Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS)

Android virtual device manager

Running the Application

3. Creating a New Android Project

3. Creating a New Android Project

Creating a new Android application project

String resources

Using the graphical layout designer

The XML layout code editor

Widget interactions through the source code editor

Running the application on the emulator

Running the application on an Android device

4. Incorporating Multimedia Elements

4. Incorporating Multimedia Elements

Adding a TableLayout

Adding the image resources

Adding ImageView

Adding ImageButtons

Assigning the widget's ID

ImageButtons and handling event

Adding another screen in the app

Adding HTML to WebView

Intent and Activity

The final product run and test

5. Adding RadioButton, CheckBox, Menu, and Preferences

5. Adding RadioButton, CheckBox, Menu, and Preferences

Creating a new project

Adding a RadioGroup, RadioButton, and a TextField

Adding a CheckBox

Defining the Strings

Defining the Preference screen

Run the application

6. Handling Multiple Screen Types

6. Handling Multiple Screen Types

Using wrap_content and match_parent

Running the application

Optimizing for tablet

Persisting the state information during the state transition

7. Adding an External Library

7. Adding an External Library

Creating an account at the AdMob website

Running the application

8. Signing and Distributing APK

8. Signing and Distributing APK

APK – Android package

Preparing for release

Using the Eclipse ADT for release

Publishing to Google Play

Index

Customer Reviews

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What is Android?

What is Android?

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications (platform). The Android Software Development Kit (SDK) provides the tools and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language. The kernel of Android is Linux.

Introducing the Android app

A mobile software application that runs on Android is an Android app. The apps use the extension of .apk as the installer file extension. There are several popular examples of mobile apps such as Foursquare, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and so on.

Primarily in an Eclipse environment, we use Java, which is then compiled into Dalvik bytecode (not the ordinary Java bytecode). Android provides Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) inside Android (not Java virtual machine JVM). Dalvik VM does not ally with Java SE and Java ME libraries and is built on Apache Harmony java implementation.

What is Dalvik Virtual?

Dalvik VM is a register-based architecture, authored by Dan Bornstein. It is being optimized for low memory requirements and the virtual machine was slimmed down to use less space and less power consumption.

Understanding API level

API level is an integer value that uniquely identifies the framework API revision offered by a version of the Android platform.

The Android platform provides a framework API that applications can use to interact with the underlying Android system. The framework API consists of:

A core set of packages and classes
A set of XML elements and attributes for declaring a manifest file
A set of XML elements and attributes for declaring and accessing resources
A set of Intents
A set of permissions that applications can request, as well as permission enforcements included in the system

How many versions (distributions) Android has?

The latest distribution statistics until May 1, 2013, are shown in the following screenshot. It indicates that Android 2.3.3 has the largest market share; however, Android 4.1.x is gaining momentum and will have the dominant share. It is important to know that if the app is primarily targeted to an Android version, it will not run on the previous version of Android.

For instance, if you are developing an app for Android 2.2 (API level 8), then the application will not run on Android 2.1 (API level 7) and below. However, the app is compatible for Android 2.2 and later.

How many versions (distributions) Android has?

Pie chart of the Android API level distribution (Source: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)

How many versions (distributions) Android has?

The Android API level distribution (Source: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html )