Developing with Google Android - GUI Layout (
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GUI Layout
Google documentation walks you
through a basic “Hello World” application; this sample makes use of the plug-in
and its default application.
Developers can try that out if they‘ve
downloaded the SDK and Eclipse. One thing I want to mention in particular is
something that makes development for Android easy. Most of today’s development
tools allow for easy development of a GUI by describing the GUI rather than
coding it. Instead of calling an API
function to add three buttons to a window, a user describes the three buttons
and the run-time does the hard work of reading the descriptions and adding the
buttons to the window. This concept isn’t by any means new—early Mac and
Windows developers have used resource files for ages, and today we have
As you would therefore expect, especially
considering this is Java we’re using, the GUI development includes a full set
of layouts, such as a table layout, various list layouts, absolute layouts and
others.
Conclusion: Where to Go Next
I found the best place to understand
how everything fits together is to read three articles in particular from the
official documentation in this order:
code.google.com/android/intro/anatomy.html
and
code.google.com/android/intro/appmodel.html
for information on the application model, and then
code.google.com/android/intro/lifecycle.html
for information on the application lifecycle.
Understanding these three documents is
vital to understanding how Android works.
Senior Editor Jeff Cogswell can be reached at jeffrey.cogswell@ziffdavisenterprise.com.
Application Development 
