Android Development Components

So you are a beginner or eager to learn android? Well then you are at the right place. Like lot of other tutorials and blogs who straight away make you deep dive into android basics or java basics,i would first cover the basic ingredients which are essential for you to understand the android as a platform.Before beginning with it,let see how android development makes a difference in the mobile world:

  • You get a commonly used programming language(java) with some commonly used libraries(Apache Commons API) with support for tools such as Android Studio
  • At the core of Android Platform is Linux Kernel, responsible for device drivers, resource access,power management,and other OS duties.On April 27, 2009, the Android 1.5 update was released, based on Linux kernel 2.6.27.Currently 3.4.0 version of kernel is being used.
  • The supplied device drivers include Display,Camera,Keyboard,WiFi,Flash Memory,Audio and IPC(inter process communication).
  • At the next level,on top of the kernel, are a number of C/C++ libraries such as OpenGL,WebKit, FreeType, Secure Sockets Layer,the C runtime library, SQLite and Media.

Moving on, Following areas are important for understanding the composition of an Android Application:

  1. Programming Logic ( Java )
  2. UI components ( XML and java )
  3. Data Storage ( SQLite, Firebase etc.)
  4. Connectivity ( HTTP )
  5. Compiling ( Gradle )

As you can see learning android is not just about java basics and android syntax but it involves knowledge about lot of other components as well.

For developing android application we can use the tool Android Studio which is fairly simple and is the official integrated development environment ( IDE ) .Android Studio was announced on May16, 2013. It can be downloaded from here.

Once you are done with the ground work, it is time to understand the tools which helps in developing efficient android app. It is rightly mentioned “you can learn a lot from the broken code, but not if you don’t know how to read the signs”. So while developing an app you might come across lot of errors, memory leakage or warnings. Handling these scenario is one aspect but understanding them is another. One must get their hands on following tools to better understand how things work in android.

  1. Android Debugging Bridge(ADB)
  2. Dalkvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS)
  3. Traceview
  4. Dmtracedumb

In case you are still left with any query/question, don’t worry Android comes to your rescue.Android provides documentation for everything related to the Android platform.

Note : Kindly feel free to contact me for any query/suggestion/guidance.