Android API 文档（1）Android的介绍

最新推荐文章于 2021-06-16 17:11:42 发布

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分类专栏： Android 文章标签： android应用 android平台 operating system sandbox api

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萌生了一种翻译API文档的念头，每天更一篇吧谷歌官方API文档的第一个是对Android平台的介绍和对Android应用的组成的剖析和各个组件的介绍。

Android apps are written in the Java programming language. The Android SDK tools compile your code—along with any data and resource files—into an APK: an Android package, which is an archive file with an .apk suffix. One APK file contains all the contents of an Android app and is the file that Android-powered devices use to install the app.

Android的app是通过java语言来写的，Android sdk 工具会编译你的代码，然后将你的数据和资源文件打包成一个以apk后缀的文件，这个时候我们就可以将其安装在我们的手机上运行。

Once installed on a device, each Android app lives in its own security sandbox:

The Android operating system is a multi-user Linux system in which each app is a different user.
By default, the system assigns each app a unique Linux user ID (the ID is used only by the system and is unknown to the app). The system sets permissions for all the files in an app so that only the user ID assigned to that app can access them.
Each process has its own virtual machine (VM), so an app's code runs in isolation from other apps.
By default, every app runs in its own Linux process. Android starts the process when any of the app's components need to be executed, then shuts down the process when it's no longer needed or when the system must recover memory for other apps.

当我们安装好一个app之后在设备上之后，每一个应用会存在一个属于自己的安全的沙箱之中，Android操作系统是一个多用户的linux的系统，在这个系统中，每一个app都是一个单独的用户。默认下，每一个app会被分配一个独一无二的ID，这个iD成为了这个app访问一些文件的权限,之后拥有这个ID的才可以获取文件，每一个进程都会跑在一个独立的虚拟机上，所以各个app之间在运行的时候是互不干扰的。

In this way, the Android system implements the principle of least privilege. That is, each app, by default, has access only to the components that it requires to do its work and no more. This creates a very secure environment in which an app cannot access parts of the system for which it is not given permission.

However, there are ways for an app to share data with other apps and for an app to access system services:

It's possible to arrange for two apps to share the same Linux user ID, in which case they are able to access each other's files. To conserve system resources, apps with the same user ID can also arrange to run in the same Linux process and share the same VM (the apps must also be signed with the same certificate).
An app can request permission to access device data such as the user's contacts, SMS messages, the mountable storage (SD card), camera, Bluetooth, and more. All app permissions must be granted by the user at install time.

That covers the basics regarding how an Android app exists within the system. The rest of this document introduces you to:

The core framework components that define your app.
The manifest file in which you declare components and required device features for your app.
Resources that are separate from the app code and allow your app to gracefully optimize its behavior for a variety of device configurations.

在这种沙箱操作的方式下，使得每一个app都在一个相对比较安全的环境中去运行，只有当其获得了足够的权限才可以去访问其他的app，当这个app获得权限之后就可以访问设备的通讯录，短信以及sd卡中的内容，然后就是一个app的核心组件，mainfest文件的作用和资源文件是如何被分离你的代码允许app对其进行访问。

App Components

App components are the essential building blocks of an Android app. Each component is a different point through which the system can enter your app. Not all components are actual entry points for the user and some depend on each other, but each one exists as its own entity and plays a specific role—each one is a unique building block that helps define your app's overall behavior.

每一个组件组建成了一个app，这些组件有的是可以单独的存在，有的是相互协调来进行工作，每一个都有自己独一无二的作用，来使的app完成每一个操作，

There are four different types of app components. Each type serves a distinct purpose and has a distinct lifecycle that defines how the component is created and destroyed.

Here are the four types of app components:

Activities

An activity represents a single screen with a user interface. For example, an email app might have one activity that shows a list of new emails, another activity to compose an email, and another activity for reading emails. Although the activities work together to form a cohesive user experience in the email app, each one is independent of the others. As such, a different app can start any one of these activities (if the email app allows it). For example, a camera app can start the activity in the email app that composes new mail, in order for the user to share a picture.

An activity is implemented as a subclass of Activity and you can learn more about it in the Activitiesdeveloper guide.

Services

A service is a component that runs in the background to perform long-running operations or to perform work for remote processes. A service does not provide a user interface. For example, a service might play music in the background while the user is in a different app, or it might fetch data over the network without blocking user interaction with an activity. Another component, such as an activity, can start the service and let it run or bind to it in order to interact with it.

A service is implemented as a subclass of Service and you can learn more about it in the Servicesdeveloper guide.

Content providers

A content provider manages a shared set of app data. You can store the data in the file system, an SQLite database, on the web, or any other persistent storage location your app can access. Through the content provider, other apps can query or even modify the data (if the content provider allows it). For example, the Android system provides a content provider that manages the user's contact information. As such, any app with the proper permissions can query part of the content provider (such as ContactsContract.Data) to read and write information about a particular person.

Content providers are also useful for reading and writing data that is private to your app and not shared. For example, the Note Pad sample app uses a content provider to save notes.

A content provider is implemented as a subclass of ContentProvider and must implement a standard set of APIs that enable other apps to perform transactions. For more information, see the Content Providersdeveloper guide.

Broadcast receivers

A broadcast receiver is a component that responds to system-wide broadcast announcements. Many broadcasts originate from the system—for example, a broadcast announcing that the screen has turned off, the battery is low, or a picture was captured. Apps can also initiate broadcasts—for example, to let other apps know that some data has been downloaded to the device and is available for them to use. Although broadcast receivers don't display a user interface, they may create a status bar notification to alert the user when a broadcast event occurs. More commonly, though, a broadcast receiver is just a "gateway" to other components and is intended to do a very minimal amount of work. For instance, it might initiate a service to perform some work based on the event.

A broadcast receiver is implemented as a subclass of BroadcastReceiver and each broadcast is delivered as an Intent object. For more information, see the BroadcastReceiver class.

上面是app中的四个组件，分别为Activity，Services，Content providers 和Broadcast receiver分别介绍一下其各自的作用

Activity

也就是我们在app中所看到的界面，这就是activity中为我们呈现的，例如我们写一个发送电子邮件的app，首先我们需要的是需要一个activity来呈现这些邮箱信件的列表界面，然后就是需要一个activity来书写邮件发送邮件。在一个activity中我们会用来完成一些我们能够看到的界面的操作。

Services

这个组件也是类似于activity的，只不过它的操作是不可见的，也就是在后台运行的，这个组件一般会用来完成一些比较耗时的操作或者是一些需要长时间存在的操作，例如我们可以用它来在后台播放音乐，一个activity可以与services来进行协调运作进行一系列的操作。

Content providers

接触这个的时候首先是在获取本地通讯录的时候用的，一个content providers 管理了一系列的各个app的分享出的数据，你可以将这些数据存储在本地数据库，文件系统或着是web上，例如，Android体统提供了一个content provider 来管理用户的手机通讯录，一个获得权限的app是可以查询这些数据的，和读取修改这些数据的，content providers对一些读取和书写数据也是有用的如果这些数据是私密的不可分享，（这点在后期博客中介绍到Content providers 的时候会具体的说一下）

Broadcast receivers

这个组件是用来接受系统发出的一些广播的，例如手机电量不足呀，屏幕变暗之类的，当然app自己也是可以发送广播，然后使得其他的app接受，比如提示摸个应用，文件下载完成等，这些广播大多是通过通知栏的形式给予提示的。

A unique aspect of the Android system design is that any app can start another app’s component. For example, if you want the user to capture a photo with the device camera, there's probably another app that does that and your app can use it, instead of developing an activity to capture a photo yourself. You don't need to incorporate or even link to the code from the camera app. Instead, you can simply start the activity in the camera app that captures a photo. When complete, the photo is even returned to your app so you can use it. To the user, it seems as if the camera is actually a part of your app.

When the system starts a component, it starts the process for that app (if it's not already running) and instantiates the classes needed for the component. For example, if your app starts the activity in the camera app that captures a photo, that activity runs in the process that belongs to the camera app, not in your app's process. Therefore, unlike apps on most other systems, Android apps don't have a single entry point (there's nomain() function, for example).

Because the system runs each app in a separate process with file permissions that restrict access to other apps, your app cannot directly activate a component from another app. The Android system, however, can. So, to activate a component in another app, you must deliver a message to the system that specifies your intent to start a particular component. The system then activates the component for you.

Android系统再设计上的一个独一无二的方面就是Android系统中一个app是可以调用另一个app中的组件，例如我的一个app需要拍照功能，我不需要自己去写一个而是直接就可以调用系统中其它的app中可以进行照相的就可以了，而且android并不像其它的应用一样，他是拥有多个入口的，当我们在调用的时候首先会向系统发送一个请求，系统会根据这一请求进行相应的判断，然后为你调用组件。

Activating Components

Three of the four component types—activities, services, and broadcast receivers—are activated by an asynchronous message called an intent. Intents bind individual components to each other at runtime (you can think of them as the messengers that request an action from other components), whether the component belongs to your app or another.

An intent is created with an Intent object, which defines a message to activate either a specific component or a specific type of component—an intent can be either explicit or implicit, respectively.

For activities and services, an intent defines the action to perform (for example, to "view" or "send" something) and may specify the URI of the data to act on (among other things that the component being started might need to know). For example, an intent might convey a request for an activity to show an image or to open a web page. In some cases, you can start an activity to receive a result, in which case, the activity also returns the result in an Intent (for example, you can issue an intent to let the user pick a personal contact and have it returned to you—the return intent includes a URI pointing to the chosen contact).

For broadcast receivers, the intent simply defines the announcement being broadcast (for exam ple, a broadcast to indicate the device battery is low includes only a known action string that indicates "battery is low").

The other component type, content provider, is not activated by intents. Rather, it is activated when targeted by a request from a ContentResolver. The content resolver handles all direct transactions with the content provider so that the component that's performing transactions with the provider doesn't need to and instead calls methods on the ContentResolver object. This leaves a layer of abstraction between the content provider and the component requesting information (for security).

There are separate methods for activating each type of component:

You can start an activity (or give it something new to do) by passing an Intent to startActivity() orstartActivityForResult() (when you want the activity to return a result).
You can start a service (or give new instructions to an ongoing service) by passing an Intent tostartService(). Or you can bind to the service by passing an Intent to bindService().
You can initiate a broadcast by passing an Intent to methods like sendBroadcast(), sendOrderedBroadcast(), orsendStickyBroadcast().
You can perform a query to a content provider by calling query() on a ContentResolver.

For more information about using intents, see the Intents and Intent Filters document. More information about activating specific components is also provided in the following documents: Activities, Services,BroadcastReceiver and Content Providers.

启动一个组件，四个组件中的这三个组件，activity，services和broadcast receivers是被一个叫做Intent的异步消息来启动的，我们可以认为他们是一个消息接受者，组件给予其action让它去干什么，他们就会按照意图去做，我们通过Intent来启动这些组件，但是组件content provier并不是通过Intent来进行启动的，而是通过一个来自于ContentResolver的请求，当一个组件需要获取数据的时候是通过contentresolver的方法来进行获取的，而不是直接访问content provider来进行的，这些保护了数据的安全。下面是各个组件的启动方法。

The Manifest File

Before the Android system can start an app component, the system must know that the component exists by reading the app's AndroidManifest.xml file (the "manifest" file). Your app must declare all its components in this file, which must be at the root of the app project directory.

The manifest does a number of things in addition to declaring the app's components, such as:

Identify any user permissions the app requires, such as Internet access or read-access to the user's contacts.
Declare the minimum API Level required by the app, based on which APIs the app uses.
Declare hardware and software features used or required by the app, such as a camera, bluetooth services, or a multitouch screen.
API libraries the app needs to be linked against (other than the Android framework APIs), such as the Google Maps library.
And more

Declaring components

The primary task of the manifest is to inform the system about the app's components. For example, a manifest file can declare an activity as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest ... >
    <application android:icon="@drawable/app_icon.png" ... >
        <activity android:name="com.example.project.ExampleActivity"
                  android:label="@string/example_label" ... >
        </activity>
        ...
    </application>
</manifest>

In the <application> element, the android:icon attribute points to resources for an icon that identifies the app.

In the <activity> element, the android:name attribute specifies the fully qualified class name of the Activitysubclass and the android:label attributes specifies a string to use as the user-visible label for the activity.

You must declare all app components this way:

<activity> elements for activities
<service> elements for services
<receiver> elements for broadcast receivers
<provider> elements for content providers

Activities, services, and content providers that you include in your source but do not declare in the manifest are not visible to the system and, consequently, can never run. However, broadcast receivers can be either declared in the manifest or created dynamically in code (as BroadcastReceiver objects) and registered with the system by calling registerReceiver().

For more about how to structure the manifest file for your app, see The AndroidManifest.xml Filedocumentation.

Declaring component capabilities

As discussed above, in Activating Components, you can use an Intent to start activities, services, and broadcast receivers. You can do so by explicitly naming the target component (using the component class name) in the intent. However, the real power of intents lies in the concept of implicit intents. An implicit intent simply describes the type of action to perform (and, optionally, the data upon which you’d like to perform the action) and allows the system to find a component on the device that can perform the action and start it. If there are multiple components that can perform the action described by the intent, then the user selects which one to use.

The way the system identifies the components that can respond to an intent is by comparing the intent received to the intent filters provided in the manifest file of other apps on the device.

When you declare an activity in your app's manifest, you can optionally include inten t filters that declare the capabilities of the activity so it can respond to intents from other apps. You can declare an intent filter for your component by adding an <intent-filter> element as a child of the component's declaration element.

For example, if you've built an email app with an activity for composing a new email, you can declare an intent filter to respond to "send" intents (in order to send a new email) like this:

<manifest ... >
    ...
    <application ... >
        <activity android:name="com.example.project.ComposeEmailActivity">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.SEND" />
                <data android:type="*/*" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>
    </application>
</manifest>

Then, if another app creates an intent with the ACTION_SEND action and pass it to startActivity(), the system may start your activity so the user can draft and send an email.

For more about creating intent filters, see the Intents and Intent Filters document.

Declaring app requirements

There are a variety of devices powered by Android and not all of them provide the same features and capabilities. In order to prevent your app from being installed on devices that lack features needed by your app, it's important that you clearly define a profile for the types of devices your app supports by declaring device and software requirements in your manifest file. Most of these declarations are informational only and the system does not read them, but external services such as Google Play do read them in order to provide filtering for users when they search for apps from their device.

For example, if your app requires a camera and uses APIs introduced in Android 2.1 (API Level 7), you should declare these as requirements in your manifest file like this:

<manifest ... >
    <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.camera.any"
                  android:required="true" />
    <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="7" android:targetSdkVersion="19" />
    ...
</manifest>

Now, devices that do not have a camera and have an Android version lower than 2.1 cannot install your app from Google Play.

However, you can also declare that your app uses the camera, but does not require it. In that case, your app must set the required attribute to "false" and check at runtime whether the device has a camera and disable any camera features as appropriate.

More information about how you can manage your app's compatibility with different devices is provided in theDevice Compatibility document.

上面是对Android应用中的manifest文件的介绍，篇幅比较大，在此从简叙述，望文生义，就是一个表明的意思，也就是对该应用的一个表明，1.说明所需要的权限2.说明sdk版本的最低要求，3.声明组件的功能，也是就是说的activity中的比较多，在activity中声明该activity可以做的一些功能，比如我们在要拍照de时候，系统会自动调出来我们手机上的相机和美图秀秀相机等，这就是在拍照的这个activity中我们通过

 </intent-filter>在其中间的action属性中对其能够执行的操作进行了声明，当我们调用相机的时候，系统就会根据action来选择合适的进行调用。

App Resources

An Android app is composed of more than just code—it requires resources that are separate from the source code, such as images, audio files, and anything relating to the visual presentation of the app. For example, you should define animations, menus, styles, colors, and the layout of activity user interfaces with XML files. Using app resources makes it easy to update various characteristics of your app without modifying code and—by providing sets of alternative resources—enables you to optimize your app for a variety of device configurations (such as different languages and screen sizes).

For every resource that you include in your Android project, the SDK build tools define a unique integer ID, which you can use to reference the resource from your app code or from other resources defined in XML. For example, if your app contains an image file named logo.png (saved in the res/drawable/ directory), the SDK tools generate a resource ID named R.drawable.logo, which you can use to reference the image and insert it in your user interface.

One of the most important aspects of providing resources separate from your source code is the ability for you to provide alternative resources for different device configurations. For example, by defining UI strings in XML, you can translate the strings into other languages and save those strings in separate files. Then, based on a language qualifier that you append to the resource directory's name (such as res/values-fr/ for French string values) and the user's language setting, the Android system applies the appropriate language strings to your UI.

Android supports many different qualifiers for your alternative resources. The qualifier is a short string that you include in the name of your resource directories in order to define the device configuration for which those resources should be used. As another example, you should often create different layouts for your activities, depending on the device's screen orientation and size. For example, when the device screen is in portrait orientation (tall), you might want a layout with buttons to be vertical, but when the screen is in landscape orientation (wide), the buttons should be aligned horizontally. To change the layout depending on the orientation, you can define two different layouts and apply the appropriate qualifier to each layout's directory name. Then, the system automatically applies the appropriate layout depending on the current device orientation.

For more about the different kinds of resources you can include in your application and how to create alternative resources for different device configurations, read Providing Resources.

Android的sdk工具会为每一个资源文件分配一个独一无二的Id，方便我们对其进行调用，由于手机具有自动旋转的功能这也就是要求我们要设计出来两个不同的layout来分别适应屏幕在不同的状态下的布局。