May 2009
Intermediate to advanced
334 pages
10h 8m
English
Content preview from Android Application DevelopmentBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 4. Under the Covers: Startup Code and Resources in the MJAndroid Application
Chapter 3 introduced the major application we use in this book to illustrate basic Android concepts. That chapter explained which files make up the source code, but it didn’t actually cover any source code in the application. We’ll start looking at source code in this chapter. And to allow you to get started developing an application quickly, we’ll begin with the first task every standalone application has to perform: initialization.
The events covered in this chapter occur between your selecting “Run As Android Application” from the Eclipse menu and seeing the map that MJAndroid displays at startup. This chapter shows how Android makes it easy to create relatively complex applications. In just 80 lines of code and some associated XML resource files, MJAndroid manages to:
Display an interactive map
Track the current location of the Android phone and update the map
Create a local database of information and load user preferences into it
Provide a dynamically changing menu
Display user interface elements such as labels, buttons, and spinners
Run a new Activity to display a supporting screen
The Java code in an Android application interacts tightly with XML resource files, so we’ll bounce back and forth between them in this chapter. As we point out repeatedly, XML files are easier to tweak during development and maintain over the life of an application. The design of Android encourages you to specify the look ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.