Anatomy of Android

Anatomy of Android Application
There are four building blocks to an Android application:
• Activity
• Intent Receiver
• Service
• Content Provider
Not every application needs to have all four, but your application will be written with some
combination of these.
Once you have decided what components you need for your application, you should list them
in a file called AndroidManifest.xml. This is an XML file where you declare the components
of your application and what their capabilities and requirements are. We will discuss soon,
what the AndroidManifest.xml is responsible for.
Activity :
Activities are the most common of the four Android building blocks. An activity is usually a
single screen in your application. Each activity is implemented as a single class that extends
the Activity base class. Your class will display a user interface composed of Views and respond
to events. Most applications consist of multiple screens. For example, a text messaging
application might have one screen that shows a list of contacts to send messages to, a second
screen to write the message to the chosen contact, and other screens to review old messages or
change settings. Each of these screens would be implemented as an activity.
When a new screen opens, the previous screen is paused and put onto a history stack. The user
can navigate backward through previously opened screens in the history. Screens can also
choose to be removed from the history stack when it would be inappropriate for them to remain.
Android retains history stacks for each application launched from the home screen.
Intent and Intent Filters :
Android uses a special class called Intent to move from screen to screen. Intent describe what
an application wants done. The two most important parts of the intent data structure are the
action and the data to act upon. Typical values for action are MAIN (the front door of the
application), VIEW, PICK, EDIT, etc. The data is expressed as a Uniform Resource Indicator
(URI). For example, to view a website in the browser, you would create an Intent with the
VIEW action and the data set to a Website-URI.
new Intent(android.content.Intent.VIEW_ACTION, ContentURI.create("http://anddev.org"));
There is a related class called an IntentFilter. While an intent is effectively a request to do

something, an intent filter is a description of what intents an activity (or intent receiver, see
below) is capable of handling. Activities publish their IntentFilters in the AndroidManifest.xml
file.
Intent Receiver :
You can use an IntentReceiver when you want code in your application to execute in reaction
to an external event, for example, when the phone rings, or when the data network is available,
or when it's midnight. Intent receivers do not display a UI, although they may display
Notifications to alert the user if something interesting has happened. Intent receivers are also
registered in AndroidManifest.xml, but you can also register them from code using
Context.registerReceiver().
Service :
A Service is code that is long-lived and runs without a UI. A good example of this is a media
player playing songs from a play list. In a media player application, there would probably be
one or more activities that allow the user to choose songs and start playing them. However, the
music playback itself should not be handled by an activity because the user will expect the
music to keep playing even after navigating to a new screen. In this case, the media player
activity could start a service using Context.startService() to run in the background to keep the
music going. The system will then keep the music playback service running until it has finished.
(You can learn more about the priority given to services in the system by reading Life Cycle
of an Android Application.) Note that you can connect to a service (and start it if it's not already
running) with the Context.bindService() method. When connected to a service, you can
communicate with it through an interface exposed by the service. For the music service, this
might allow you to pause, rewind, etc.
Content Provider :
Applications can store their data in files, a SQLite database, preferences or any other
mechanism that makes sense. A content provider, however, is useful if you want your
application's data to be shared with other applications. A content provider is a class that
implements a standard set of methods to let other applications store and retrieve the type of
data that is handled by that content provider.

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Anatomy of Android Application

There are four building blocks to an Android application:

Intent and Intent Filters :

new Intent(android.content.Intent.VIEW_ACTION, ContentURI.create("http://anddev.org"));

There is a related class called an IntentFilter. While an intent is effectively a request to do

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