Mobile Application
Development
Building Blocks of Android Application
Building Blocks of Android Application
• Activities
• Services
• Content Providers
• Intents
• Broadcast Receivers
• Widgets
• Notifications
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Activities
• Your application’s presentation layer.
• Every screen in your application will be an extension
of the Activity class.
• Activities use Views to form graphical user interfaces
that display information and respond to user actions.
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Activities (Cont.)
• An Activity comprises the visual components (“views”)
for one screen as well as the code that displays data
into that screen and can respond to user events on
that screen.
• Almost every application has at least one Activity
class.
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Activities (Cont.)
Same Activity
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Activities (Cont.)
Different Activities
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Activities (Cont.)
• A different app can start
any one of these
activities. For example,
another app can start
the activity in the email
app that composes new
mail.
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Services
• The invisible workers of your application.
• Service components run invisibly, updating your data
sources and visible Activities and triggering Notifications.
• They’re used to perform regular processing that needs to
continue even when your application’s Activities aren’t
active or visible.
• For example, play music in the background while the user
is in a different app, or it might fetch data over the
network.
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Content Providers
• A shareable data store.
• Content Providers are used to manage and share
application databases.
• Content Providers are the preferred way of sharing
data across application boundaries.
• Contact Manager
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Content Providers
• You can store the data in the file system, an SQLite
database, on the web, or any other persistent storage
location your app can access.
• Through the content provider, other apps can query or
even modify the data (if the content provider allows
it).
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Content Providers (Cont.)
• For example, the Android system
provides a content provider that
manages the user's contact information.
• As such, any app with the proper
permissions can query part of the
content provider to read and write
information about a particular person.
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Intents
• A simple message-passing framework.
• Using Intents, you can broadcast messages system-
wide or to a target Activity or Service, stating your
intention to have an action performed.
• The system will then determine the target(s) that will
perform any actions as appropriate.
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Broadcast Receivers
• A broadcast receiver is a component that responds to
system-wide broadcast announcements.
• Broadcast receivers don't display a user interface, but in
some cases a status bar notification is created to alert the
user when a broadcast event occurs.
• For example, a broadcast announcing that the screen has
turned off, the battery is low, or a picture was captured.
• Although Apps can also initiate broadcasts, many
broadcasts also originate from the system
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Notifications
• A user notification framework.
• Notifications let you signal users without stealing
focus or interrupting their current Activities.
• They’re the preferred technique for getting a user’s
attention from within a Service or Broadcast Receiver.
• For example, when a device receives a text message
or an incoming call, it alerts you by flashing lights,
making sounds, displaying icons, or showing dialog
messages. 14
Activating Components
• Three of the four component types—Activities, Services, and Broadcast Receivers—
are activated by an asynchronous message called an intent.
• Intents bind individual components to each other at runtime,whether the
component belongs to your app or another.
• For activities and services, an intent defines the action to perform (for example, to
"view" or "send" something) . For example, an intent might convey a request for an
activity to show an image or to open a web page.
• For broadcast receivers, the intent simply defines the announcement being
broadcast (for example, a broadcast to indicate the device battery is low includes
only a known action string that indicates "battery is low").
• Content Provider is activated (not by Intent) when targeted by a request from a
ContentResolver - handles all direct transactions between the content provider and
the component requesting information (for security).
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