Practical Android

  The ActionBar was introduced in Android 3.0 (API 11) and enable us to develop applications with a more fluid navigation using Fragments. Ever since, we are using the Action Bar in pretty much every application. The question is, how to be able to implement the Action bar in earlier < 3.0 API’s ? The support library which enables us to use Fragments for devices with API<3 is great and does the work just like we want and need. but what about action bar support? it’s not out of the box even in the support library. the excepted method of implementing Action bar for those earlier versions is actionbarsherlock(or ABS) just to keep things short. The ABS is an open-source expansion of the Android support library and it enables us to write application without having to make a implicit adjustment to out activities in order to support Action bars. The usage is simple: 1. download the project from the ABS website at : http://actionbarsherlock.com/ 2. inside the archive you’ll fi...

     A typical mobile application will probably consume some resources from a web server using http requests. This repeated task has some drawbacks: Bandwidth has a cost, polling the same data over and over again results in a waste of user’s quota. the responsiveness and user experience is compromised once the user keeps waiting for data. If the requested data hasn’t changed on the server, then there’s no reason for us to fetch it. Of course, local caching of data is a must, but we also need to be able to refresh the data if it has changed on the server. A simple solution which comes out of the box for API 4+ is http response caching. Http response caching is a mechanism which enables us as developers to save a footprint of the response utilizing the abilities of the Http protocol. Basically, is holds a simple cache of the response which can be defined and enabled in code, and it prevents from fetching unchanged data from the server which was already fetched a...

       As Android developers or developers in general, we encounter the Design Patterns paradigms pretty much in every job. Most of us as I roughly assume – go over some of the more common design patterns as an integral part in preparing for a job interview.      It is common to assume that software developers should be familiar with what design patterns are and should be able to fire couple of them and explain their usage in modern software architecture. the common patterns that you’ll probably be asked to explain are Singleton, Factory, Strategy and maybe some more exotic ones.      So the question asked, is how do classical Design patterns come handy when planning the  architecture of an android app?      The answer to this somewhat bizarre question can be divided into two mini answers : The platform which we are developing for is not important. In other words, the fact that we are dealin...