Now that you know what Android is What is Android? and what its feature set contains, Android Feature you are probably anxious to get your hands dirty and start writing some applications!
,however Before Build your own app , All you need to start Build your own Android applications is a copy of these android tools Android SDK and the Java Development Kit (JDK).
Unless you’re a masochist, you’ll probably want a Java integrated development environment (IDE) - Eclipse tools( app creation software) particularly well supported to make development a little bit less painful.
In this article I will focus on an overview about the required Android developer tools and SDKs . in the next article we will learn how to setup and use these tools Installing Android SDK tools.
For Android development, you can use Android development tools on Mac, a Windows PC, or a Linux machine. All the tools needed are free and can be downloaded from the Web. Most of the examples provided in this blog should work fine with the Android emulator. For this blog, I am using a Windows 7 computer to demonstrate all the code samples. If you are using a Mac or Linux computer, the screenshots should look similar; some minor differences may be present, but you should be able to follow along without problems.
Let us explore the Android development tools !
Android application development tools
If your computer does not have the JDK installed, you should start by downloading it from oracle website .
- The Android SDK makes use of the Java SE Development Kit (JDK).
- jdk is the base tools for Android development tools
The first and most important piece of software you need to know about it is the Android SDK. The Android Software Development Kit (SDK) contains the necessary tools to create, compile and package Android application. Most of these tools are command line based.
The Android SDK contains a debugger, libraries, an emulator, documentation, sample code, and tutorials.
- The Android SDK also provides an Android device emulator, so that Android applications can be tested without a real Android phone.
- You can create Android virtual devices (AVD) via the Android SDK manger, which run in this emulator.
- The Android SDK contains the Android debug bridge (adb) tool which allows to connect to a virtual or real Android device.
For more details about the Android SDK and Android development tools download visit this link
Eclipse RESOURCE EDITORS
Eclips is the integrated development environment (IDE) for developing your Android applications. In the case of Android, the recommended IDE is Eclipse, a multi-language software development environment featuring an extensible plug-in system.
For Android development, you should download the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers
ADT - ANDROID DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Google provides the Android Development Tools (ADT) to develop Android applications with Eclipse. ADT is a set of components (plug-ins) which extend the Eclipse IDE with Android development capabilities.
ADT contains all required functionalities to create, compile, debug and deploy Android applications from the Eclipse IDE. ADT also allows to create and start AVDs.
DALVIK VIRTUAL MACHINE
The Android system uses a special virtual machine, i.e. The Dalvik Virtual Machine to run Java based applications. Dalvik uses an own bytecode format which is different from Java bytecode.
Therefore you cannot directly run Java class files on Android, they need to get converted in the Dalvik bytecode format.
HOW TO DEVELOP ANDROID APPLICATIONS
To learn How to build an android app . first let explore code . Android code is written using Java syntax, and the core Android libraries include most of the features from the core Java APIs. Before you can run your projects, you must translate them into Dalvik bytecode. As a result, you get the familiarity of Java syntax while your applications gain the advantage of running on a VM optimized for mobile devices.
- The Java source files are converted to Java class files by the Java compiler.
- The Android SDK contains a tool called dx which converts Java class files into a .Dex (Dalvik Executable) file.
- All class files of one application are placed in one compressed .Dex file. During this conversion process redundant information in the class files are optimized in the .dex file. For example if the same String is found in different class files, the .dex file contains only once reference of this String. These dex files are therefore much smaller in size than the corresponding class files.
- The .dex file and the resources of an Android project, e.g. the images and XML files, are packed into an .apk (Android Package) file. The program aapt (Android Asset Packaging Tool) performs this packaging.
The resulting .apk file contains all necessary data to run the Android application and can be deployed to an Android device via the adb tool. The Android Development Tools (ADT) perform these steps transparently to the user.
If you use the ADT tooling you press a button the whole Android application (.apk file) will be created and deployed.