Android Application Development

Chapter 2. Setting Up Your Android Development Environment

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Android applications, like most mobile phone applications, are developed in a host-target development environment. In other words, you develop your application on a host computer (where resources are abundant) and download it to a target mobile phone for testing and ultimate use. Applications can be tested and debugged either on a real Android device or on an emulator. For most developers, using an emulator is easier for initial development and debugging, followed by final testing on real devices.

To write your own Android mobile phone applications, you’ll first need to collect the required tools and set up an appropriate development environment on your PC or Mac. In this chapter we’ll collect the tools you need, download them and install them on your computer, and write a sample application that will let you get the feel of writing and running Android applications on an emulator. Linux, Windows, and OS X are all supported development environments, and we’ll show you how to install the latest set of tools on each. Then, we’ll show you any configuration you need to do after installing the tools (setting PATH environment variables and the like), again for each of the three operating systems. Finally, we’ll write a short little “Hello, Android” application that demonstrates what needs to be done in order to get a generic application running.

The Android SDK supports several different integrated ...