Work tools

Before presenting the work necessary tools to develop applications for Android, we list the prerequisites necessary for an understanding of the guide.

Pre-requisites

First, it requires the reader a good understanding of the programming language Java (because applications are written in this language) and knowledge, even preliminary, the XML language to quickly understand code listings that we are going to present during the 'Analysis of test applications.
Obviously, since the code will be explained step by step, even a reader who is not easily mastered these two languages ​​would be able to understand the examples without much difficulty.

Tools of the Trade

We are now going to see the tools we're going to use in the development of our projects.

Eclipse

Use, such as development IDE, the famous Eclipse. The latter turns out to be the best software for developing applications in Java. The potential of Eclipse are many and would require a dedicated guide to list them all. Suffice to say that includes a very efficient system of auto-thanks to which, in addition to speed up writing code, we can see prototypes and return types of each method.

Android Development Tools (ADT)

Contains all the classes and Lebrero necessary to develop Android applications. Obviously if we try to instantiate a class in Eclipse dall'ADT provided it returns an error because the Eclipse does not contain these libraries. We therefore instruct Eclipse to duty and in fact we're going to integrate the entire Eclipse ADT that simply providing a link to the ADT. The procedure is extremely simple and will be shown in later chapters.

SDK and Simulator

Android provides developers with an SDK that contains many components needed for developing applications. The most important component is the simulator which, in fact, allows a developer to directly test the developed application on your computer without necessarily having a physical device.
It is advisable to always work with the latest version of the SDK available, as is released whenever a release is loaded with new features that we might expect to use.

Once integrated into the Eclipse ADT, the simulator is automatically invoked when we launch our project. We will see later in the guide that you need to create an Android Virtual Device to test our applications and it is possible to create this virtual device by loading the characteristics relating to the latest SDK or earlier versions. Depending on the version chosen, when we launch our application, the simulator will be called automatically adjusted to emulate the previously created virtual device.

This methodology is often used to test the applications on devices that feature an operating system more dated. Since, as we said earlier, each release introduces new features should be that if we insert these new features in our application they do not interfere with the smooth application of the same devices that do not support (perhaps for a failure to update the part of 'user). Let us say that it is a good idea to develop a basic functioning of all devices and then introduce ancillary features supported by newer versions of the operating system.

Java and XML

Java is object-oriented programming language that you must use to develop applications for Android. It 'a very powerful language and is relatively easy to learn and understand. And 'in fact, no pointer arithmetic present for example in C and C + +.

XML is, instead, a markup language like HTML to be clear, that will be used mainly to define the layout and positioning of graphics.

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