Android Development Tools Part 2

Android Development Tools(ADT)

ADT (Android Developer Tools) is a plugin for Eclipse that provides a suite of tools that are integrated with the Eclipse IDE .ADT provides various tools  which facilitates the design of speedy quality applications. These tools comprise   of development, design, analysis and debug tools.

Getting a good knowledge of all these tools will help you in developing and debugging your Android applications in better and efficient manner. Let’s go through all these tools briefly, I will be discussing these tools in detail in next chapter after you install and get familiar with Eclipse IDE

The most important SDK tools include the Android SDK Manager (Androdid SDK), the AVD Manager (Android AVD) the emulator (emulator), and the Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS). A summary of some of the  commonly -used SDK tools is below.

Android SDK Manager: Provides the API for Android Application Development.

Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS): Helps in debugging your Android Application and integrated into Eclipse .It provides a number of various useful features  for interacting with Emulators and other Android Devices. You use DDMS to view and manage processes and threads running on the device, view heap data, attach to processes to debug, and a variety of other tasks.

Android Emulator (emulator): Also calles Android Virtual Device(AVD), Since you are developing Android application, you need to test your application in an Android Device.Emulator is a virtual Android device that looks, acts, and behave like a physical Android device. You can use Emulator to run and debug and test your Android Application. A comprehensive detail of how to create , manage emulators will be discussed in next chapter.

Hierarchy Viewer (hierarchyviewer) Lets you debug and optimize an Android application's user interface. It shows your

Draw 9-patch Allows you to easily create a NinePatch graphic using a WYSIWYG editor. It also previews stretched versions of the image, and highlights the area in which content is allowed.

Note : These tools are present in tools folder  in Android SDK folder. See following fig. for reference.

Creating and configuring emulator has been  discussed in next chapter.