Working with the Android Platform - 06/26/2009

Idan Warsawski

The Android platform, developed by the open handset alliance, provides a powerful framework for mobile software development. Unlike many other smart phones, there is no cost to begin developing (not even an email address is required) and the SDK is available for all major platforms. In addition, a very large set of APIs are available, allowing developers to access parts of the phone restricted in other platforms, such as the sending and receiving SMS messages.

In this talk I will discuss the networking application I built over the past few weeks and various tricks of the Android platform that I learned along the way. While the actual application is a fairly simple socket based one that sends and receives user data, it showcases both powerful APIs that make development easy (such as Messages/Handlers for communication between threads) and various annoyances that have to be factored in during development (such as the application lifecycle).

-- Main.JieMeng - 25 Jun 2009