One of the most common functionalities required in mobile applications is to call a web service to retrieve data. This process involves requesting the web service with parameters, receiving the response and parsing it to obtain data. Today the most common web services types are SOAP and REST. Android does not provide a built in SOAP client, […]

We saw before that we can persist an application’s data using SQLite database. Android offers another way to store user’s data through using preferences. Android preferences is a key/value entries that store data that can be specific to a certain activity or shared among all activities within the application. the data are stored in a […]

In the previous post we saw one way to deal with threads in Android, which is by using Handlers. In this post we’ll see how to use another technique which is using AsyncTask class. AsyncTask is an abstract class that provides several methods managing the interaction between the UI thread and the background thread. it’s […]

Multi-Threading concept is essential in most platforms. it provides maximum utilization of the processor. threading is used when the program executes time consuming processes (such as calling a web service) and to give a good user experience by unblocking the UI. Android provides threading techniques to perform time consuming tasks in a background thread with coordination with the […]

In this tutorial I will cover building Android content providers. Content providers are the way that Android applications can share info between each other. an application can ask for info from another application using content providers. In this post we’re going to create a content provider to access data from our previous Employees simple application […]

In the last post we created a sqlite database android application. We saw that the database file is stored in the file system directories of that application meaning that the database cannot be accessed from another application. You can apply the same thing on any resources within your application (Files, images, videos, …). But there […]

Android default Database engine is Lite. SQLite is a lightweight transactional database engine that occupies small amout of disk storage and memory, so its a perfect choice for creating databases on many mobile operating systems such as Android, iOS. Things to consider when dealing with SQLite: Data type integrity is not maintained in SQLite, you […]

In this post we’re going to see two interesting controls in Android: ViewFlipper and SlidingDrawer. View Flipper: Suppose you want to display a news bar in your activity. this news bar displays a single news item at a time then flips and shows next item and so on, then your choice would be Android’s ViewFlipper. […]

Android offers two methods to display messages to the user: Toasts and Alerts. in this post we’re going to explore both of them. Toasts: toasts are pop up messages that lasts for a certain duration and then disappear. a Toast is a transient message that appears and disappears without any interaction from the user and […]

In Android the Gallery control is a selection control that displays items in a horizontal gallery. the items in the gallery appear beside each other. they can appear separated by a pre-defined space. we can use the gallery to display String items using a simple ArrayAdapter. so let’s see how to create a gallery that […]