In addition to situations where you want to improve performance of critical parts of your code by rewriting them in C, as it was shown in the previous article, there is another common use case for Android NDK. Often you will find useful pieces of legacy code written in C and you'll want to use them in your apps. In this case, your obvious choice would be to try to use NDK to attach the legacy code... [More]

Contrary to what some inexperienced developers think, NDK is not a silver bullet for any performance problem that you face in your app. Before you make a decision to rewrite a portion of your code in C, you have to think twice. Your effort might not pay off as much as you think, as NDK is not unconditionally faster than Dalvik code. If you already spent some time learning NDK, then you know that ... [More]

The MVC (model-view-controller) pattern has been extremely popular in web application frameworks, but even if you never developed for the Web, I am sure that you at least heard this term before. Today we will develop a simple star rating widget that looks like this: This widget works the following way: every time you tap it, the number of stars increases by 1. If there were 5 stars, the rating... [More]

One of the major reasons why Java became so popular is the vast amount of existing code such as libraries, examples and open source applications, that is available to Java developers. When you develop in Java, chances are most of the "chore" code that your application needs has already been written, and good chances are that the code that you need is open source and has a flexible license. Thus, a... [More]