Building an Android Application 101

Speaker: Jason Chen

Poor Jason Chen, he wasn't having any luck with his presentation. About 15 minutes in, Eclipse hung on him and caused his Mac to 'grey-screen'. He had to reboot and then Eclipse literally took about five, maybe ten minutes to restart.

Anyway, he got going again in the end. He did a walk through of how to build an Android application using the Android plugin for Eclipse and the Android emulator. (See my earlier post for the keynote demo of Android.

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• XML is used to control the layout of the application.
• Android applications have the concept of activities and intents. An application can perform a number of activities and can express a number of intents. When an application expresses an intent, for example - "view a photo", the Android system handles the matching of the application expressing an intent to an application that can perform a relevant activity. There is a loose coupling between intents and activities.
• The matching of applications expressing intent with applications able to satisfy those intents with relevant activities is all transparent to the end user.
• Storage and persistence options
  • Preferences
  • Flat files - file system access
  • SQLite - full SQL database for your application if you are using relational data.
  • Also possible to implement your own content provider