Professional Android™ 2 Application Development

Chapter 3. Creating Applications and Activities

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• An introduction to the Android application components and the different types of Android applications you can build with them

• The Android application life cycle

• How to create and annotate the application manifest

• How to use external resources to provide dynamic support for locations, languages, and hardware configurations

• How to implement and use your own Application class

• How to create new Activities

• Understanding an Activity's state transitions and life cycle

Before you start writing your own Android applications, it's important to understand how they're constructed and to have an understanding of the Android application life cycle. In this chapter you'll be introduced to the loosely coupled components that make up Android applications and how they're bound together by the Android manifest. Next you'll see how and why you should use external resources, before getting an introduction to the Activity component.

In recent years there's been a move toward development frameworks featuring managed code, such as the Java virtual machine and the .NET Common Language Runtime.

In Chapter 1 you learned that Android also uses this model, with each application running in a separate process on its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine. In this chapter you'll learn more about the application life cycle and how it's managed by the Android run time. This leads to an introduction of the application process states. These states are ...