Android Programming – Part 1 – On The Netbook

To take the next step in my exploration of Android, I've decided not only to research the theory but also get some hands on experience and do some programming. I was first a bit unsure as to how much time is required to set up the environment but when I tried, it was actually pretty much straight forward.

All Android apps run in the Dalvik Virtual machine and are programmed in Java and making use of the Android API for pretty much everything from displaying something on the screen to exchanging data with the network. The API and the whole virtual machine is supplied by Google so no matter from which manufacturer you have an Android based phone and what kind of extensions they have put in for the idle screen and additional applications, it will always work in the same way. This is a big difference to the previous Java approach that got very fragmented over time with developers complaining left and right. More about the API in a future post.

In this post I'd like to quickly mention a few things about how to get set up. Google does a superb job here at describing how to install the Eclipse development environment and the Android SDK and how to link the two together. For my first steps I installed Ubuntu in a virtual machine on my desktop PC so I could experiment without compromising my main installation just in case things didn't work out.

Another reason for using a virtual machine first was that I had some doubts the environment would work well on my Atom processor based netbook. At first I saw my doubts confirmed when starting the Android emulator which is slow at best and almost maxes out the "core duo" processor of my desktop even when just sitting there. But I soon found out how to run my experiments on a real device, removing this limitation. Therefore the next logical step was to get the programming environment set-up on my netbook as well. And to my pleasant surprise, it works surprisingly well and fast on the netbook as well. The small screen size is of course somewhat of a limitation but it is still quite workable.

Why on the netbook you might ask? Well, I commute a lot and I travel a lot and now that I'm hooked, I don't want to interrupt my activities for days and weeks just because I don't have the environment with me. In a number of follow-up posts I'll describe how apps interact with Android and the network with practical examples. And yes, I'll give out the app and the source for it as well. Consider the screenshot on the left of Eclipse running on my netbook as a sneak preview 🙂