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Lecture no 06 Building Blocks of Android Application

Building Blocks of Android Application

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Mian Haider
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15 views

Lecture no 06 Building Blocks of Android Application

Building Blocks of Android Application

Uploaded by

Mian Haider
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 15

Mobile Application

Development
Building Blocks of Android Application
Building Blocks of Android Application

• Activities
• Services
• Content Providers
• Intents
• Broadcast Receivers
• Widgets
• Notifications
2
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.

3
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.

4
Activities (Cont.)

Same Activity

5
Activities (Cont.)

Different Activities

6
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.

7
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.
8
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

9
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).

10
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.

11
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.

12
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
13
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).
15

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