Android Development Tutorial (Based on Android 4.1) class-3

Android Development Tools

1. Android SDK

The Android Software Development Kit (SDK) contains the necessary tools to create, compile and package Android application. Most of these tools are command line based.

The Android SDK also provides an Android device emulator, so that Android applications can be tested without a real Android phone. You can create Android virtual devices (AVD) via the Android SDK, which run in this emulator.

The Android SDK contains the Android debug bridge (adb) tool which allows to connect to an virtual or real Android device.

2. Android Development Tools

Google provides the Android Development Tools (ADT) to develop Android applications with Eclipse. ADT is a set of components (plug-ins) which extend the Eclipse IDE with Android development capabilities.

ADT contains all required functionalities to create, compile, debug and deploy Android applications from the Eclipse IDE. ADT also allows to create and start AVDs.

The Android Development Tools (ADT) provides specialized editors for resources files, e.g. layout files. These editors allow to switch between the XML representation of the file and a richer user interface via tabs on the bottom of the editor.

3. Dalvik Virtual Machine

The Android system uses a special virtual machine, i.e. the Dalvik Virtual Machine to run Java based applications. Dalvik uses an own bytecode format which is different from Java bytecode.

Therefore you cannot directly run Java class files on Android, they need to get converted in the Dalvik bytecode format.

4. How to develop Android Applications

Android applications are primarily written in the Java programming language. The Java source files are converted to Java class files by the Java compiler.

The Android SDK contains a tool called dx which converts Java class files into a .dex (Dalvik Executable) file. All class files of one application are placed in one compressed .dex file. During this conversion process redundant information in the class files are optimized in the .dex file. For example if the same String is found in different class files, the .dex file contains only once reference of this String.

These dex files are therefore much smaller in size than the corresponding class files.

The .dex file and the resources of an Android project, e.g. the images and XML files, are packed into an .apk (Android Package) file. The program aapt (Android Asset Packaging Tool) performs this packaging.

The resulting .apk file contains all necessary data to run the Android application and can be deployed to an Android device via the adb tool.

The Android Development Tools (ADT) performs these steps transparently to the user.

If you use the ADT tooling you press a button the whole Android application (.apk file) will be created and deployed.

5. Resource editors

The ADT allows the developer to define certain artifacts, e.g. Strings and layout files, in two ways: via a rich editor, and directly via XML. This is done via multi-page editors in Eclipse. In these editors you can switch between both representations by clicking on the tab on the lower part of the screen.

For example if you open the res/layout/main.xml file in the Package Explorer View of Eclipse, you can switch between the two representations as depicted in the following screenshot.



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Android Development Tutorial (Based on Android 4.1) class-2