android java ide_AIDE (Android Java IDE) Tutorial

AIDE, otherwise known as Android Java IDE, has been rated 5 stars 1,437/1656 times, has been installed over 100,000 times and has all the key features that any Android developer needs.

In my books it has to be one of the most useful applications on the market for developers, and it doesn't even require root.

You can download it by pressing here.

Now that I have said a little bit about it should we get into it?

This should be the first screen you see as soon as you install it, they know you want to get straight in and check it out, no mucking around, so lets do hello Android on this eh?

First we want to write in our appications name, write this in under "App Name:" we will call this application "HellpAndroid" (note that there is no space, it appears to be that you cannot have a space in the name, you can change that by going res > values > strings.xml and changing the string app_name). Also we need to put in our package name, for this we have a certain simple format to write it in, .. so for example for me, I live in New Zealand which has the country code "nz" and my developers name is "SmartLemon" but in the package I have it as my original name "TheSmartLemon" so my package name will be "nz.thesmartlemon.helloandroid". Post in the comment below what yours is if you like, see what variations we get.

There is also an option for whether we want it to be a Activity or Service, but since we are doing Hello Android we will leave it as an Activity.

Once doing all that just press "Create" and we can get started.

You should see this screen as it loads, be patient, remember it has to create all your files for you, and do everything your IDE on your computer does, and most phones have at least half the power of your computer (unless you have a old one).

You should now be presented with an activity that has some text in it, this is the JAVA editor, it is where the logic of the application goes.

Underneath all the text is the file explorer, to get out of this simply press the little computer button at the top or press the text editor and it should hide. To get back to this press the computer button again and it will come back.

So lets click into the JAVA editor and bring up our keyboard (should be automatic).

Right now you will see a bit of text, this is java code, as I said before it is the logic's behind the the application, what runs it, what tells it to do things.

In most java documents there is a part of code called the class this is what most of the code is inside, notice that this class extends Activity this is because we want the class to behave as an activity.

All Android applications are built up of activities and services, activities are things you see, like the browser or application launcher, services are the things you don't see, like a download or an mp3 player in the background.

Delete the code below as we want to do something cooler.

setContentView(R.layout.main);

Now what we want to do is display some text. To do this we need to first say that we want to make one to do this we need to first make a vairable (or holder as I like to say) and tell Android that its going to be a text view.

For that we need to write the following code. "text" is the name of this TextView.

TextView text;

Notice how there is a semi-colon on the end of that? Thats to say that we have finished with that command and to do the next, on Android devices you should be able to get this by going symbols and it should be around the percentage sign or colon.

Underneath this we want to say we want a new TextView, to do this we need to use the following code.

text = new TextView(this);

I put "this" inside brackets after TextView so Android knows the context of the TextView is this.

After that we can set the text to display, we want it to say "Hello Android User", this is what I want it to display, you can dislpay what ever you want, as long as it is in the quote marks.

I used the following code to show the text.

text.setText("Hello Android User!");

So now we have a new TextView and we have the text set, now we just want to display it.

Start to type setContentView in and a cool pop-up list should appear, this has to be the best feature of AIDE, just click on setContentView and it will automatically insert it for you, you can also hold down on it and it will take you to the Android Developers Resources page that tells you everything about it, cool eh?

Once you have that written in following setContentView you need to say what you want to set it as. You can use the following code to set it as the text

setContentView(text);

Notice how this is in brackets again? You will see why in later tutorials. ;D

It should all look like this now, pre cool eh?

Now its ready to run, before we carry on you will first need to check to see if you can install non-market applications, to do this go to your devices settings and go applications and then make sure the "Unknown sources" checkbox is checked, if it is return to AIDE and press menu and then run on < 2.3 or press the three lines in the top right hand corner of the screen for 3.0 > and press run, AIDE will now build your application. You will then be asked to install this application to your device, once installed open it up and you will be greated with your application.

And this is what it should look like :D, go back to AIDE and change the text between the quote marks (" ") and see what happens. :D

Congratulations on your first AIDE application and let this not be the last :

Keep checking in on this site as I will have more tutorials for both Eclipse and AIDE in the future.

I do reply to comments and questions down below :D.