 Home

 SDK
 Dev Guide
 Reference
 Resources
 Videos
 Blog

Android.com
search developer docs Search  


Community
o Developer Forums
o IRC, Twitter
 Device Dashboard
o Platform Versions
o Screen Sizes & Densities
 Technical Articles
o List of Articles
 Avoiding Memory Leaks
 Backward Compatibility
 Can I Use this Intent?
 Creating an Input Method
 Drawable Mutations
 Faster Screen Orientation Change
 Future-Proofing Your Apps
 Gestures
 Introducing GLSurfaceView
 Layout Tricks: Reusing
 Layout Tricks: Efficiency
 Layout Tricks: ViewStubs
 Layout Tricks: Merging
 ListView Backgrounds
 Live Folders
 Live Wallpapers
  Onscreen Input Methods
 Painless Threading
 Quick Search Box
 Speech Input
 Touch Mode
 Tracking Memory Allocations
 UI Framework Changes in Android 1.5
 UI Framework Changes in Android 1.6
 Updating the UI from a Timer
 Using Text-to-Speech
 Using the Contacts API
 Using WebViews
 WikiNotes: Linkify your Text!
 WikiNotes: Routing Intents
 Window Backgrounds & UI Speed
 Zipalign: An Easy Optimization
 Tutorials
o Hello World
o Hello Views
o Hello Localization
o Hello Testing
o Notepad Tutorial
o Activity Testing
 Sample Code
o Getting the Samples
o List of Samples
 API Demos
 Backup and Restore new!
 Bluetooth Chat
 Business Card
 Contact Manager
 Home
 JetBoy
 Live Wallpaper
 Lunar Lander
 Multiple Resolutions
 Note Pad
 Sample Sync Adapter
 Searchable Dictionary v2 new!
 Snake
 Soft Keyboard
 Spinner new!
 SpinnerTest new!
 TicTacToeLib new!
 TicTacToeMain new!
  Wiktionary
 Wiktionary (Simplified)
 More
o Common Tasks
o Troubleshooting Tips
o FAQs
 App Framework FAQ
 Licensing FAQ
 Security FAQ

Hello, World
In this document
1. Install a Platform
2. Create an AVD
3. Create the Project
4. Construct the UI
5. Run the Code
6. Upgrade the UI to an XML Layout
7. Debug Your Project
8. Creating the Project Without Eclipse

As a developer, you know that the first impression of a development framework is how easy it is
to write "Hello, World." Well, on Android, it's pretty easy. It's particularly easy if you're using
Eclipse as your IDE, because we've provided a great plugin that handles your project creation
and management to greatly speed-up your development cycles.

This tutorial assumes that you're using Eclipse. If you're not, see Developing in Other IDEs. You
can then return to this tutorial and ignore anything about Eclipse.

Before you start, you should already have the SDK installed, and if you're using Eclipse, you
should have installed the ADT plugin as well. If you have not installed these, see Installing the
Android SDK and return here when you've completed the installation.

Install a Platform
To run the Hello World application, you need to install at least one Android platform in your
SDK environment. If you have not already performed this step, you need to do it now.

To install a platform in Eclipse:

 1. In the Android SDK and AVD Manager, choose
Available Packages in the left panel.
2. Click the repository site checkbox to display the
components available for installation.
3. Select at least one platform to install, and click
Install Selected. If you aren't sure which platform
to install, use the latest version.

Create an AVD
To learn more about how to use AVDs and the options available to you, refer to the Android
Virtual Devices document.

In this tutorial, you will run your application in the Android Emulator. Before you can launch the
emulator, you must create an Android Virtual Device (AVD). An AVD defines the system image
and device settings used by the emulator.

To create an AVD:

1. In Eclipse, choose Window > Android SDK and

AVD Manager.
2. Select Virtual Devices in the left panel.
3. Click New.

The Create New AVD dialog appears.

4. Type the name of the AVD, such as "my_avd".

5. Choose a target. The target is the platform (that is,
the version of the Android SDK, such as 2.1) you
want to run on the emulator.

You can ignore the rest of the fields for now.

6. Click Create AVD.

Create a New Android Project

After you've created an AVD, the next step is to start a new Android project in Eclipse.

1. From Eclipse, select File > New > Project.

If the ADT Plugin for Eclipse has been

successfully installed, the resulting dialog should
have a folder labeled "Android" which should
contain "Android Project". (After you create one
 or more Android projects, an entry for "Android
XML File" will also be available.)

2. Select "Android Project" and click Next.

3. Fill in the project details with the following

values:
o Project name: HelloAndroid
o Application name: Hello, Android
o Package name: com.example.helloandroid
(or your own private namespace)
o Create Activity: HelloAndroid

Click Finish.
Here is a description of each field:
Project Name
This is the Eclipse Project name — the name of
the directory that will contain the project files.
Application Name
This is the human-readable title for your
application — the name that will appear on the
Android device.
Package Name
This is the package namespace (following the
same rules as for packages in the Java
programming language) that you want all your
source code to reside under. This also sets the
package name under which the stub Activity will
be generated.

Your package name must be unique across all

packages installed on the Android system; for this
reason, it's important to use a standard domain-
style package for your applications. The example
above uses the "com.example" namespace, which
is a namespace reserved for example
documentation — when you develop your own
applications, you should use a namespace that's
appropriate to your organization or entity.

Create Activity
This is the name for the class stub that will be
generated by the plugin. This will be a subclass of
Android's Activity class. An Activity is simply a
class that can run and do work. It can create a UI if
it chooses, but it doesn't need to. As the checkbox
suggests, this is optional, but an Activity is almost
always used as the basis for an application.
Min SDK Version
This value specifies the minimum API Level
required by your application. For more
information, see Android API Levels.

Other fields: The checkbox for "Use default

location" allows you to change the location on
disk where the project's files will be generated and
stored. "Build Target" is the platform target that
your application will be compiled against (this
should be selected automatically, based on your
Min SDK Version).
 Notice that the "Build Target" you've selected uses
the Android 1.1 platform. This means that your
application will be compiled against the Android
1.1 platform library. If you recall, the AVD
created above runs on the Android 1.5 platform.
These don't have to match; Android applications
are forward-compatible, so an application built
against the 1.1 platform library will run normally
on the 1.5 platform. The reverse is not true.

Your Android project is now ready. It should be visible in the Package Explorer on the left. Open
the HelloAndroid.java file, located inside HelloAndroid > src > com.example.helloandroid).
It should look like this:

package com.example.helloandroid;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;

public class HelloAndroid extends Activity {

    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }
}

Notice that the class is based on the Activity class. An Activity is a single application entity
that is used to perform actions. An application may have many separate activities, but the user
interacts with them one at a time. The onCreate() method will be called by the Android system
when your Activity starts — it is where you should perform all initialization and UI setup. An
activity is not required to have a user interface, but usually will.

Now let's modify some code!

Construct the UI
Take a look at the revised code below and then make the same changes to your HelloAndroid
class. The bold items are lines that have been added.

package com.example.helloandroid;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class HelloAndroid extends Activity {

   /** Called when the activity is first created. */
   @Override
   public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
       super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
       TextView tv = new TextView(this);
       tv.setText("Hello, Android");
       setContentView(tv);
   }
}

Tip: An easy way to add import packages to your project is to press Ctrl-Shift-O (Cmd-Shift-
O, on Mac). This is an Eclipse shortcut that identifies missing packages based on your code and
adds them for you.

An Android user interface is composed of hierarchies of objects called Views. A View is a

drawable object used as an element in your UI layout, such as a button, image, or (in this case) a
text label. Each of these objects is a subclass of the View class and the subclass that handles text
is TextView.

In this change, you create a TextView with the class constructor, which accepts an Android
Context instance as its parameter. A Context is a handle to the system; it provides services like
resolving resources, obtaining access to databases and preferences, and so on. The Activity class
inherits from Context, and because your HelloAndroid class is a subclass of Activity, it is also a
Context. So, you can pass this as your Context reference to the TextView.

Next, you define the text content with setText().

Finally, you pass the TextView to setContentView() in order to display it as the content for the
Activity UI. If your Activity doesn't call this method, then no UI is present and the system will
display a blank screen.

There it is — "Hello, World" in Android! The next step, of course, is to see it running.

Run the Application

The Eclipse plugin makes it easy to run your applications:

1. Select Run > Run.

2. Select "Android Application".

To learn more about creating and editing run configurations in Eclipse, refer to Developing In
Eclipse, with ADT.

The Eclipse plugin automatically creates a new run configuration for your project and then
launches the Android Emulator. Depending on your environment, the Android emulator might
take several minutes to boot fully, so please be patient. When the emulator is booted, the Eclipse
plugin installs your application and launches the default Activity. You should now see something
like this:
The "Hello, Android" you see in the grey bar is actually the application title. The Eclipse plugin
creates this automatically (the string is defined in the res/values/strings.xml file and
referenced by your AndroidManifest.xml file). The text below the title is the actual text that
you have created in the TextView object.

That concludes the basic "Hello World" tutorial, but you should continue reading for some more
valuable information about developing Android applications.

Upgrade the UI to an XML Layout

The "Hello, World" example you just completed uses what is called a "programmatic" UI layout.
This means that you constructed and built your application's UI directly in source code. If you've
done much UI programming, you're probably familiar with how brittle that approach can
sometimes be: small changes in layout can result in big source-code headaches. It's also easy to
forget to properly connect Views together, which can result in errors in your layout and wasted
time debugging your code.
That's why Android provides an alternate UI construction model: XML-based layout files. The
easiest way to explain this concept is to show an example. Here's an XML layout file that is
identical in behavior to the programmatically-constructed example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<TextView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  android:id="@+id/textview"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="fill_parent"
  android:text="@string/hello"/>

The general structure of an Android XML layout file is simple: it's a tree of XML elements,
wherein each node is the name of a View class (this example, however, is just one View
element). You can use the name of any class that extends View as an element in your XML
layouts, including custom View classes you define in your own code. This structure makes it
easy to quickly build up UIs, using a more simple structure and syntax than you would use in a
programmatic layout. This model is inspired by the web development model, wherein you can
separate the presentation of your application (its UI) from the application logic used to fetch and
fill in data.

In the above XML example, there's just one View element: the TextView, which has five XML
attributes. Here's a summary of what they mean:

Attribute Meaning
This is an XML namespace declaration that tells the Android tools that
xmlns:android
you are going to refer to common attributes defined in the Android
namespace. The outermost tag in every Android layout file must have
this attribute.
This attribute assigns a unique identifier to the TextView element.
android:id You can use the assigned ID to reference this View from your source
code or from other XML resource declarations.
This attribute defines how much of the available width on the screen
android:layout_width
this View should consume. In this case, it's the only View so you want
it to take up the entire screen, which is what a value of "fill_parent"
means.
android:layout_height
This is just like android:layout_width, except that it refers to available
screen height.
This sets the text that the TextView should display. In this example,
you use a string resource instead of a hard-coded string value. The
hello string is defined in the res/values/strings.xml file. This is the
android:text recommended practice for inserting strings to your application,
because it makes the localization of your application to other
languages graceful, without need to hard-code changes to the layout
file. For more information, see Resources and Internationalization.

These XML layout files belong in the res/layout/ directory of your project. The "res" is short
for "resources" and the directory contains all the non-code assets that your application requires.
In addition to layout files, resources also include assets such as images, sounds, and localized
strings.

Landscape layout
When you want a different design for landscape, put your layout XML file inside /res/layout-
land. Android will automatically look here when the layout changes. Without this special
landscape layout defined, Android will stretch the default layout.

The Eclipse plugin automatically creates one of these layout files for you: main.xml. In the
"Hello World" application you just completed, this file was ignored and you created a layout
programmatically. This was meant to teach you more about the Android framework, but you
should almost always define your layout in an XML file instead of in your code. The following
procedures will instruct you how to change your existing application to use an XML layout.

1. In the Eclipse Package Explorer, expand the

/res/layout/ folder and open main.xml (once
opened, you might need to click the "main.xml"
tab at the bottom of the window to see the XML
source). Replace the contents with the following
XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<TextView
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.co
m/apk/res/android"
  android:id="@+id/textview"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="fill_parent"
  android:text="@string/hello"/>

Save the file.

2. Inside the res/values/ folder, open

strings.xml. This is where you should save all
default text strings for your user interface. If
you're using Eclipse, then ADT will have started
you with two strings, hello and app_name. Revise
hello to something else. Perhaps "Hello, Android!
I am a string resource!" The entire file should now
look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<resources>
    <string name="hello">Hello, Android!
I am a string resource!</string>
    <string name="app_name">Hello,
 Android</string>
</resources>

3. Now open and modify your HelloAndroid class

use the XML layout. Edit the file to look like this:

package com.example.helloandroid;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;

public class HelloAndroid extends

Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is
first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle
savedInstanceState) {
       
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }
}

When you make this change, type it by hand to try

the code-completion feature. As you begin typing
"R.layout.main" the plugin will offer you
suggestions. You'll find that it helps in a lot of
situations.

Instead of passing setContentView() a View

object, you give it a reference to the layout
resource. The resource is identified as
R.layout.main, which is actually a compiled
object representation of the layout defined in
/res/layout/main.xml. The Eclipse plugin
automatically creates this reference for you inside
the project's R.java class. If you're not using
Eclipse, then the R.java class will be generated for
you when you run Ant to build the application.
(More about the R class in a moment.)

Now re-run your application — because you've created a launch configuration, all you need to do
is click the green arrow icon to run, or select Run > Run History > Android Activity. Other
than the change to the TextView string, the application looks the same. After all, the point was to
show that the two different layout approaches produce identical results.

Tip: Use the shortcut Ctrl-F11 (Cmd-Shift-F11, on Mac) to run your currently visible
application.
Continue reading for an introduction to debugging and a little more information on using other
IDEs. When you're ready to learn more, read Application Fundamentals for an introduction to all
the elements that make Android applications work. Also refer to the Developer's Guide
introduction page for an overview of the Dev Guide documentation.

R class

In Eclipse, open the file named R.java (in the gen/ [Generated Java Files] folder). It should
look something like this:

package com.example.helloandroid;

public final class R {

    public static final class attr {
    }
    public static final class drawable {
        public static final int icon=0x7f020000;
    }
    public static final class id {
        public static final int textview=0x7f050000;
    }
    public static final class layout {
        public static final int main=0x7f030000;
    }
    public static final class string {
        public static final int app_name=0x7f040001;
        public static final int hello=0x7f040000;
    }
}

A project's R.java file is an index into all the resources defined in the file. You use this class in
your source code as a sort of short-hand way to refer to resources you've included in your
project. This is particularly powerful with the code-completion features of IDEs like Eclipse
because it lets you quickly and interactively locate the specific reference you're looking for.

It's possible yours looks slighly different than this (perhaps the hexadecimal values are different).
For now, notice the inner class named "layout", and its member field "main". The Eclipse plugin
noticed the XML layout file named main.xml and generated a class for it here. As you add other
resources to your project (such as strings in the res/values/string.xml file or drawables
inside the res/drawable/ direcory) you'll see R.java change to keep up.

When not using Eclipse, this class file will be generated for you at build time (with the Ant tool).

You should never edit this file by hand.

Debug Your Project

The Android Plugin for Eclipse also has excellent integration with the Eclipse debugger. To
demonstrate this, introduce a bug into your code. Change your HelloAndroid source code to look
like this:

package com.example.helloandroid;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;

public class HelloAndroid extends Activity {

    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        Object o = null;
        o.toString();
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }
}

This change simply introduces a NullPointerException into your code. If you run your
application again, you'll eventually see this:
Press "Force Quit" to terminate the application and close the emulator window.

To find out more about the error, set a breakpoint in your source code on the line Object o =
null; (double-click on the marker bar next to the source code line). Then select Run > Debug
History > Hello, Android from the menu to enter debug mode. Your app will restart in the
emulator, but this time it will suspend when it reaches the breakpoint you set. You can then step
through the code in Eclipse's Debug Perspective, just as you would for any other application.

Creating the Project without Eclipse

If you don't use Eclipse (such as if you prefer another IDE, or simply use text editors and
command line tools) then the Eclipse plugin can't help you. Don't worry though — you don't lose
any functionality just because you don't use Eclipse.

The Android Plugin for Eclipse is really just a wrapper around a set of tools included with the
Android SDK. (These tools, like the emulator, aapt, adb, ddms, and others are documented
elsewhere.) Thus, it's possible to wrap those tools with another tool, such as an 'ant' build file.

The Android SDK includes a tool named "android" that can be used to create all the source code
and directory stubs for your project, as well as an ant-compatible build.xml file. This allows
you to build your project from the command line, or integrate it with the IDE of your choice.

For example, to create a HelloAndroid project similar to the one created in Eclipse, use this
command:
android create project \
    --package com.example.helloandroid \
    --activity HelloAndroid \
    --target 2 \
    --path <path-to-your-project>/HelloAndroid

This creates the required folders and files for the project at the location defined by the path.

For more information on how to use the SDK tools to create and build projects, please read
Developing in Other IDEs.

↑ Go to top
Except as noted, this content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5. For details
and restrictions, see the Content License.

Site Terms of Service - Privacy Policy - Brand Guidelines

vvv