Chapter 3 IDE: Android Studio Overview

Chapter 3 IDE: Android Studio Overview

Android Studio, Google's official IDE, was developed based on IntellyJ IDEA to replace Eclipse. However, it is still an earlier version, the current version is 0.4.2, released every three months, the most recent version was released in January 2014.

Android Studio includes all the tools you need to develop Android apps, but it's not mature, so eclipse is recommended if you need stability. But Android Studio has brought us a lot of new features, so let's take a look at this looking forward star of the future.

Installation

You can download the corresponding version on the Android Developer's website.

Create a project

Open Android Studio (ABS below) and there are some options in the welcome screen to select New Project.

You can see that the creation interface is very similar to Eclipse, you can all choose the default, and then click Next.

Along the way, these are very similar to Eclipse.

After the creation wizard is completed, AS creates an Android Studio Project folder where all Android engineering files are.

The development environment

When the creation project is complete, AS opens Actity by default for editing, and also opens a virtual device interface to display the app above.

In Eclipse we'll have a Package Explorer, and we'll have a similar interface in AS, but it's not the default display, double-click on the item name to open it.

In the layout interface you can see both the component tree and the visual interface.

One difference between AS and Eclipse is that the files you need to operate on in AS are basically under the src directory, because AS is based on Gradle, but that doesn't affect you switching between the two IDEs.

The interaction of the project

One advantage of AS is that many of its tools have buttons that can be used directly, such as AVD Manager, SDK Manager, debugging tools, and so on.

Like Eclipse, AS provides many views for interacting with engineering. You'll find a view called Android very useful, which provides information about virtual and real devices, as well as information about Logcat output.

Summarize

This article briefly describes the interface of Android Studio, but it includes more useful features to make development easier. T his is because it is specifically designed to develop Android apps, unlike Eclipse, which needs to support more development scenarios. Once you're used to Eclipse, maybe you'll try using Android Studio.

Now that our development environment is ready, we'll look at the structure of the Android app in the next chapter.