Android Programming

[Peter Childs]

Does anyone know of any good step by step guide to learning and working out Android Programming?

I ended up having a bit of discussion on this with Ed on Tuesday, and I'm getting quite confused.

Statement: Android uses Java doesn't it?

Answer: Well no not really, although that is a common held belief, Android uses DEX which is a different kind of Byte code and the Class files need to be converted, also it uses its own AWT and its own way of organising the code. so everything is done slightly differently than Java's standard toolkit, true the code looks the same and the standard core java libraries can be used, but if you've written for the JavaME its completely different and you can't just take a JavaME program and run it on android. (JavaME is "Java Mobile Edition" and is Sun's idea of how to use Java on a Mobile Environment) 

Its like Microsoft's idea of Java never matched Sun's idea of Java and eventually got renamed C#. The whole idea of "What is Java" has got fragmented..... together with the whole C class of languages (C, C++, Objective C, Java, C#, PHP (How did that one get there?)).......

I might have to look for a good book.......

Peter.

Disclaimer: Sun means all products formally owned by the former Sun Microsystems before it was bought out by Oracle. I'm not really sure Oracle plan to do anything with JavaME its not really used......

[Peter Childs]

Right.... I know what it is, I'm getting stuck on Model - View - Controller design patterns. I think it is something that was either missed when I did my Degree 10 years ago or has become popular since....... I seam to remember it being covered in about one lecture or sign patterns and thats about it, it seams to have been very popular over the last 5 years and hardly used before that.......

From what I can work out Model, View, Controller is a bigger change in thinking as Object Orientation was for Modular Programmers... and Linear before that.

I first hit it in QT4 (it was not in QT3) and I don't really remember it in VB or the old Java AWT but I have slight memories of it in Java Swing but I've never done that much work in Swing.........

Peter.

[Edmond Lepedus]

Yep, afaik, MVC is supposed to be THE way to write software these days, but I don't know enough about it to confidently help you out. There is definitely a wealth of information out there about it, if you want to brush up on it. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Peter Childs]

Yes from what I understand......

Oo brought data and code together into an object. In that an object should store data and work on that data. And that you should not have an object that does not do both.

Mvc splits it up again. So

M  - model you data, this is not a complete object in that it does not need to do anything but hold data. A typedef so to speak.

V - view the gui for the data. Usually some kind of form again no need for code. It's a but like html and css without the JavaScript.

C - controller the controlling code.

Hence Mvc is not strict oo because oo never really worked anyway. True you can complement it with some oo principles. But there is no reason to not write a Mvc based program with no objects at all. Just data, display and code which Mvc encourages you to keep separate. But the oo design pattern brought it together......

Hmm would make an interesting uni essay :-)

I'll point out we are talking design patterns here NOT languages. They are different.

Peter