You should now have a workable Android development environment set up on your computer. Hopefully, you also have an Android device as well. Now it’s time for you to start writing some Android code. In this chapter, you learn how to add and create Android projects in Eclipse and verify that your Android development environment is set up correctly. You also write and debug your first Android application in the software emulator and on an Android device.
Testing Your Development Environment
The best way to make sure you configured your development environment correctly is to take an existing Android application and run it. You can do this easily by using one of the sample applications provided as part of the Android SDK in the samples subdirectory found where your Android SDK is installed.
Within the Android SDK sample applications, you will find a classic game called Snake (http://goo.gl/wRojX). To build and run the Snake application, you must create a new Android project in your Eclipse workspace based on the existing Android sample project, create an appropriate Android Virtual Device (AVD) profile, and configure a launch configuration for that project. After you have everything set up correctly, you can build the application and run it on the Android emulator and on an Android device. By testing your development environment with a sample application, you can rule out project configuration and coding issues and focus on determining whether the tools are set up properly for Android development. After this fact has been established, you can move on to writing and compiling your own applications.
Adding the Snake Project to Your Eclipse Workspace
The first thing you need to do is add the Snake project to your Eclipse workspace. To do this, follow these steps:
- Choose File, New, Other....
- Choose Android, Android Sample Project (see Figure 3.1). Click Next.
Figure 3.1 Creating a new Android project.
- Choose your build target (see Figure 3.2). In this case, we’ve picked Android 4.0, API Level 14, from the Android Open Source Project. Click Next.
Figure 3.2 Choose an API level for the sample.
- Next, select which sample you want to create (see Figure 3.3). Choose Snake.
Figure 3.3 Picking the sample project.
- Click Finish. You now see the Snake project files in your workspace (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4 The Snake project files.
Creating an Android Virtual Device (AVD) for Your Snake Project
The next step is to create an AVD that describes what type of device you want to emulate when running the Snake application. This AVD profile describes what type of device you want the emulator to simulate, including which Android platform to support. You do not need to create new AVDs for each application, only for each device you want to emulate. You can specify different screen sizes and orientations, and you can specify whether the emulator has an SD card and, if it does, what capacity the card is.
For the purposes of this example, an AVD for the default installation of Android 2.3.3 suffices. Here are the steps to create a basic AVD:
- Launch the Android Virtual Device Manager from within Eclipse by clicking the little Android device icon on the toolbar (). If you cannot find the icon, you can also launch the manager through the Window menu of Eclipse.
- Click the New button.
- Choose a name for your AVD. Because we are going to take all the defaults, give this AVD a name of Android_Vanilla4.0.
- Choose a build target. We want a typical Android 4.0 device, so choose Google APIs (Google Inc.) – API Level 14 from the drop-down menu. This will include the Google Android applications, such as the Maps application, as part of the platform image.
- Choose an SD card capacity, in either kibibytes or mibibytes. Not familiar with kibibytes? See this Wikipedia entry: http://goo.gl/N3Rdd. This SD card image will take up space on your hard drive, so choose something reasonable, such as 1024MiB.
- Seriously consider enabling the Snapshot feature. This feature greatly improves emulator startup performance. See Appendix A, “The Android Emulator Quick-Start Guide,” for details.
- Choose a skin. This option controls the different resolutions of the emulator. In this case, we use the recommended WVGA800 screen. (The emulator in Tools R14 has known performance issues with running the standard Android 4.0 screen resolution of WXGA720.) This skin most directly correlates to the popular 4.0 devices. Feel free to choose the most appropriate skin to match the Android device on which you plan to run the application.
Your project settings will look like Figure 3.5.
Figure 3.5 Creating a new AVD.
- Click the Create AVD button and then wait for the operation to complete.
- Click Finish. Because the AVD manager formats the memory allocated for SD card images, creating AVDs with SD cards could take a few moments.
For more information on creating different types of AVDs, check out Appendix A.
Creating a Launch Configuration for Your Snake Project
Next, you must create a launch configuration in Eclipse to configure under what circumstances the Snake application builds and launches. The launch configuration is where you configure the emulator options to use and the entry point for your application.
You can create Run configurations and Debug configurations separately, each with different options. These configurations are created under the Run menu in Eclipse (Run, Run Configurations and Run, Debug Configurations). Follow these steps to create a basic Debug configuration for the Snake application:
- Choose Run, Debug Configurations.
- Double-click Android Application to create a new configuration.
- Name your Debug configuration SnakeDebugConfiguration.
- Choose the project by clicking the Browse button and choosing the Snake project.
- Switch to the Target tab and, from the preferred AVD list, choose the Android_Vanilla4.0 AVD created earlier, as shown in Figure 3.6.
Figure 3.6 The Snake application Debug configuration in Eclipse.
You can set other emulator and launch options on the Target and Common tabs, but for now we are leaving the defaults as they are.
Running the Snake Application in the Android Emulator
Now you can run the Snake application using the following steps:
- Choose the Debug As icon drop-down menu on the toolbar ().
- Pull the drop-down menu and choose the SnakeDebugConfiguration you created. If you do not see your new configuration listed, find it in the Debug Configurations listing and click the Debug button. Subsequent launches can be initiated from the little bug drop-down.
- The Android emulator starts up; this might take a few moments to initialize. Then the application will be installed or reinstalled onto the emulator.
Figure 3.7 Configuring AVD launch options.
- If necessary, swipe the screen from left to right to unlock the emulator, as shown in Figure 3.8.
Figure 3.8 The Android emulator launching (locked).
- The Snake application starts and you can play the game, as shown in Figure 3.9.
Figure 3.9 The Snake game in the Android emulator.
You can interact with the Snake application through the emulator and play the game. You can also launch the Snake application from the Application drawer at any time by clicking its application icon. There is no need to shut down and restart the emulator every time you rebuild and reinstall your application for testing. Simply leave the emulator running on your computer in the background while you work in Eclipse and then redeploy using the Debug configuration again.