Android

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Application Framework

Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems, including:

A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, including lists, grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser

Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data

A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graphics, and layout files

A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar

An Activity Manager that manages the lifecycle of applications and provides a common navigation backstack

For more details and a walkthrough of an application, see the Notepad Tutorial.

Libraries

Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework. Some of the core libraries are listed below:

System C library - a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices

Media Libraries - based on PacketVideo's OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG

Surface Manager - manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D and 3D graphic layers from multiple applications

LibWebCore - a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view

SGL - the underlying 2D graphics engine

3D libraries - an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer

FreeType - bitmap and vector font rendering

SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications

Android Runtime

Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language.

Activating components: intents

Content providers are activated when they're targeted by a request from a ContentResolver. The other three components — activities, services, and broadcast receivers — are activated by asynchronous messages called intents. An intent is an Intent object that holds the content of the message. For activities and services, it names the action being requested and specifies the URI of the data to act on, among other things. For example, it might convey a request for an activity to present an image to the user or let the user edit some text. For broadcast receivers, the Intent object names the action being announced. For example, it might announce to interested parties that the camera button has been pressed.

There are separate methods for activating each type of component:

An activity is launched (or given something new to do) by passing an Intent object to Context.startActivity() or Activity.startActivityForResult(). The responding activity can look at the initial intent that caused it to be launched by calling its getIntent() method. Android calls the activity's onNewIntent() method to pass it any subsequent intents.

One activity often starts the next one. If it expects a result back from the activity it's starting, it calls startActivityForResult() instead of startActivity(). For example, if it starts an activity that lets the user pick a photo, it might expect to be returned the chosen photo. The result is returned in an Intent object that's passed to the calling activity's onActivityResult()method.

A service is started (or new instructions are given to an ongoing service) by passing an Intent object to Context.startService(). Android calls the service's onStart() method and passes it the Intent object.

Similarly, an intent can be passed to Context.bindService() to establish an ongoing connection between the calling component and a target service. The service receives the Intent object in an onBind() call. (If the service is not already running, bindService() can optionally start it.) For example, an activity might establish a connection with the music playback service mentioned earlier so that it can provide the user with the means (a user interface) for controlling the playback. The activity would call bindService() to set up that connection, and then call methods defined by the service to affect the playback.

A later section, Remote procedure calls, has more details about binding to a service.

An application can initiate a broadcast by passing an Intent object to methods like Context.sendBroadcast(), Context.sendOrderedBroadcast(), andContext.sendStickyBroadcast() in any of their variations. Android delivers the intent to all interested broadcast receivers by calling their onReceive() methods.

For more on intent messages, see the separate article, Intents and Intent Filters.

Shutting down components

A content provider is active only while it's responding to a request from a ContentResolver. And a broadcast receiver is active only while it's responding to a broadcast message. So there's no need to explicitly shut down these components.

Activities, on the other hand, provide the user interface. They're in a long-running conversation with the user and may remain active, even when idle, as long as the conversation continues. Similarly, services may also remain running for a long time. So Android has methods to shut down activities and services in an orderly way:

An activity can be shut down by calling its finish() method. One activity can shut down another activity (one it started with startActivityForResult()) by calling finishActivity().

A service can be stopped by calling its stopSelf() method, or by calling Context.stopService().

Components might also be shut down by the system when they are no longer being used or when Android must reclaim memory for more active components. A later section, Component Lifecycles, discusses this possibility and its ramifications in more detail.

The manifest file

Before Android can start an application component, it must learn that the component exists. Therefore, applications declare their components in a manifest file that's bundled into the

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