Book Image

Expert Android Programming

Book Image

Expert Android Programming

Overview of this book

Android O brings a number of important changes for the users as well as the developers. If you want to create smart android applications which are fast, lightweight and also highly efficient then this is the book that will solve all your problems. You will create a complex enterprise grade app in this book. You will get a quick refresher of the latest android SDK and how to configure your development environment. Then you will move onto creating app layouts, component and module building, creating smart and efficient UIs. The most important part of a modern day app is how real time they are. With this book, you will create a smooth back-end for your app, ensure dynamic and real time communication between different app layers. As we move on, you will learn to leverage the different Android APIs and create an efficient SQLite data layer for your apps. You will implement effective testing techniques to make your app reliable and robust and finally you will learn to deploy it efficiently. The multiple stages of android development will also be simplified by giving you an industry standard set of best practices.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
10
Building Restaurant finder

Understanding the Gradle System

Google introduced Gradle and Android Studio in order to help make the development process more streamlined. They wanted to ensure that it becomes easier for developers to reuse code and also help them create build variants with ease. Having it closely integrated with an IDE such as Android Studio ensured that Gradle has a good IDE integration without making the build system dependent on the IDE.

In this chapter, we will discuss:

  • Setting up Gradle in Android Studio
  • Dependent libraries to be used in Android Studio, including Identifiers

If you have been using Eclipse, it's likely that some of you won't know of any alternative to the default APK generation technique within the IDE. But, as such as alternative, you can do this using the command line. The Android build system compiles app resources and source code, and packages them into APKs that you can test, deploy, sign, and distribute.