14 UI Toolkit

g14001

The UI toolkit provides most of the visual elements on the screen. Buttons, text, animations, and the graphics that draw all of those things are all part of the UI toolkit on Android.

In late 2005, there was no UI toolkit (nor was there much of anything else, either). There was low-level graphics functionality that allowed some things to be drawn on the screen using the Skia library. And there were two conflicting ideas for how to build a UI toolkit on top of that graphics engine.

On one side, Mike Reed’s Skia team had a working system which used XML to describe the UI and JavaScript code to provide the programming logic.

Get Androids now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.