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Create Your First Android Application

Software Requirement

1. JDK (latest version) is installed on your machine
2. Android SDK is installed on your machine
3. Eclipse 3.6.2 or greater is installed on your machine
4. ADT (Advanced Development ToolKit) is configured on your machine.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Create Your First Application

1. Open eclipse
2. Click on File menu – New – Project

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3. A window appears as shown in figure below

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4. Select ‘Android Application Project’. Click ‘Next’. A window appears as shown in figure below

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5. Enter Application Name and click on ‘Next’. A window appears as shown in figure below.

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6. Click on ‘Next’ and a window appears as shown in figure below.

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Here we have Activity Name and Layout Name. Layout Name (activity_main) is a XML file which stores UI element and Activity Name (MainActivity) is a class which performs some action. For example send an email, take a photo is an example of an activity.


7. Click Finish. Once click on ‘Finish’ a project is created.

Project Structure

1. src - The src folder contains the source code files of your application. In the project we have one file with the name ‘MainActivity.Java’ (This is the activity name which we have given when we created the project). See the screen shot below for src folder.

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In the file ‘MainActivity.Java’ we have 2 methods i.e. onCreate() and onCreateOptionsMenu(). I will discuss about it in the subsequent tutorials.


2. Secondly we have layout file i.e. activity_main.xml which is inside the res folder.

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3. Android 4.1 – The version number in the folder name is same as the build target version of android application.
4. We have AndroidManifest.xml file which contains information about the project like package name, activities etc. There are many other information but we are not covering all information in a single tutorial. See the screen shot below for AndroidManifest.xml

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Output