What is an IDE?

If you've looked into app development, you know that we need to write code at some point. This mysterious text resembles English sometimes, but the punctuation can look all wrong. There are many different types of code that we will need to write to build an app:

• Code that defines your app's user interface
• Code that determines the how your app behaves
• Code that configures settings in your app

In Android development, this translates into:

• Java files to build app behaviors and features
• XML files to define the app's user interface, the text that appears on the interface, app settings, etc
• Gradle files to modify your app's build process (we will look at this later in the course)

However, code is not the only thing that makes an app. There are icons, images, and lots of other assets that are used in your app.

When you build the app, these various components get put together into one app package. This single app is what your users will download. In Android, this is an APK file. On Windows and Mac, you might have seen .exe and .app files for applications.

Managing all these different components can be difficult. To make our lives simpler, we use IDEs: Integrated Development Environments.

IDEs have a few key features:

• They allow us to easily manage all these files that make up an app, in one easy place
• They give us powerful tools to easily edit all these files
• They have a compiler that can build these files into an installable app

We will be using an IDE called Android Studio to make apps.

Tasks

Read the Introduction and Overview sections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment.

Read the list of features that the following page boasts about for Android Studio, and compare those to what we have just learnt about IDEs: https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html