THE ANDROID APPLICATION FRAMEWORK

Welcome back, to the Basics of Android guide. Here you are going to learn Android free.

In my previous post I had given an overview of the android system. Now, that we are familiar with the stack, let's take a closer look at the application framework. 

In software systems, we often across situations where more than one module needs to perform the same task. For such tasks we generally have a library of reusable code which can be invoked from any module. This helps us eliminate repetitive code and also minimize binary size.  The Android Application Framework helps us do exactly that.

Application Framework as we saw earlier, is above the native libraries and the Android runtime system. It consists of pre-installed blocks of software which various applications can use. 

Let us take a look at some of its blocks,and try to understand how this framework facilitates re-usability

Package Manager : contains data about all the applications installed on the device 

Activity Manager : Manages the life cycle of an Application. 

Window Manager : manages the many windows of the applications. An application may need more than one window. Say ta main window, a menu window, another sub-menu window and so on. 

View System: contains common UI related elements such as pop-ups, buttons and icons. 

Content Provider : database for an application to store and retrieve data and let other app access its data. This facilitates inter application data sharing.

Similarly the other blocks Location, Notification, Telephony and Resource Managers provide services, as suggested by their names, to the top application layer. We will learn about them gradually.

Hope this Android Application Development tutorial is helping. If not, please lets us know.

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