Android A Programmers Guide, What is Android

Short Description
It can be said that, for a while, traditional desktop application developers have been spoiled. This is not to say that traditional desktop application development is easier than other forms of development. However, as traditional desktop application developers, we have had the ability to create almost any kind of application we can imagine. I am including myself in this grouping because I got my start in desktop programming. One aspect that has made desktop programming more accessible is that we have had the ability to interact with the desktop operating system, and thus interact with any underlying hardware, pretty freely (or at least with minimal exceptions). This kind of freedom to program independently, however, has never really been available to the small group of programmers who dared to venture into the murky waters of cell phone development.

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Note:
I refer to two different kinds of developers in this discussion: traditional desktop application developers, who work in almost any language and whose end product, applications, are built to run on any “desktop” operating system; and Android developers, Java developers who develop for the Android platform. This is not for the purposes of saying one is by any means better or worse than the other. Rather, the distinction is made for purposes of comparing the development styles and tools of desktop operating system environments to the mobile operating system environment, Android.
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Brief History of Embedded Device Programming
For a long time, cell phone developers comprised a small sect of a slightly larger group of developers known as embedded device developers. Seen as a less “glamorous” sibling to desktop—and later web—development, embedded device development typically got the proverbial short end of the stick as far as hardware and operating system features, because embedded device manufacturers were notoriously stingy on feature support. Embedded device manufacturers typically needed to guard their hardware secrets closely, so they gave embedded device developers few libraries to call when trying to interact with a specific device.
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Open Handset Alliance and Android
This barrier to application development began to crumble in November of 2007 when Google, under the Open Handset Alliance, released Android. The Open Handset Alliance is a group of hardware and software developers, including Google, NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel, and HTC, whose goal is to create a more open cell phone environment. The first product to be released under the alliance is the mobile device operating system, Android. (For more information about the Open Handset Alliance, see www.openhandsetalliance.com.) With the release of Android, Google made available a host of development tools and tutorials to aid would-be developers onto the new system. Help files, the platform software development kit (SDK), and even a developers’ community can be found at Google’s Android website, http://code.google.com/android. This site should be your starting point, and I highly encourage you to visit the site.
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