SYNOPSIS

City Restaurants guide

Introduction to Project

An application which lets you know about the various Hotels and Restaurants in town (Belgaum). It gives you the vast details about the type of restaurant, various cuisines available there along with its proper location mentioning the landmark places nearby to it.

It allows the user to navigate through the various details available on site. Some of its extravagant features are that it provides you with the images of the restaurants selected from the list available on the site. It allows the user with the complete food menu of that particular restaurant or hotel.

It provides the user with overall average expense of 2 persons visiting the restaurant. The user gets the complete idea of the ambience and the atmosphere of the particular selected restaurant by having a glance at the images present on site.

The most amazing feature is that the user can read the reviews of the people who have visited the place by providing a link to the blog page such as twitter and facebook, by which the user can decide whether the selected restaurant is suitable according to its needs.

It also provides the contact details of the various hotels and restaurants in town, if the user is interested to reserve a table prior to the time of visit.

Literature Survey

  Android is a complete operating environment based upon the Linux® V2.6 kernel. Initially, the

deployment target for Android was the mobile-phone arena, including smart phones and lower-

cost flip-phone devices. However, Android's full range of computing services and rich functional

support have the potential to extend beyond the mobile-phone market. Android can be useful for

other platforms and applications. In this article, get an introduction to the Android platform and

learn how to code a basic Android application.

The BlackBerry and iPhone, which have appealing and high-volume mobile platforms, are

addressing opposite ends of a spectrum. The BlackBerry is rock-solid for the enterprise business

user. For a consumer device, it's hard to compete with the iPhone for ease of use and the "cool

factor." Android, a young and yet-unproven platform, has the potential to play at both ends of the

mobile-phone spectrum and perhaps even bridge the gulf between work and play.

Today, many network-based or network-capable appliances run a flavor of the Linux kernel. It's

a solid platform: cost-effective to deploy and support and readily accepted as a good design

approach for deployment. The UI for such devices is often HTML-based and viewable with a PC

or Mac browser. But not every appliance needs to be controlled by a general computing device.

Consider a conventional appliance, such as a stove, microwave or bread maker. What if your

household appliances were controlled by Android and boasted a color touch screen? With an

Android UI on the stove-top, the author might even be able to cook something.

A brief history of Android

The Android platform is the product of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of organizations

collaborating to build a better mobile phone. The group, led by Google, includes mobile

operators, device handset manufacturers, component manufacturers, software solution and

platform providers, and marketing companies. From a software development standpoint, Android

sits smack in the middle of the open source world.

The first Android-capable handset on the market was the G1 device manufactured by HTC and

provisioned on T-Mobile. The device became available after almost a year of speculation, where

the only software development tools available were some incrementally improving SDK

releases. As the G1 release date neared, the Android team released SDK V1.0 and applications

began surfacing for the new platform.

To spur innovation, Google sponsored two rounds of "Android Developer Challenges," where

millions of dollars were given to top contest submissions. A few months after the G1, the

Android Market was released, allowing users to browse and download applications directly to

their phones. Over about 18 months, a new mobile platform entered the public arena.

The Android platform

With Android's breadth of capabilities, it would be easy to confuse it with a desktop operating

system. Android is a layered environment built upon a foundation of the Linux kernel, and it

includes rich functions. The UI subsystem includes:

Windows, Views, Widgets for displaying common elements such as edit boxes, lists, and drop-

down lists

Android includes an embeddable browser built upon WebKit, the same open source browser

engine powering the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser.

Android boasts a healthy array of connectivity options, including WiFi, Bluetooth, and wireless

data over a cellular connection (for example, GPRS, EDGE, and 3G). A popular technique in

Android applications is to link to Google Maps to display an address directly within an

application. Support for location-based services (such as GPS) and accelerometers is also

available in the Android software stack, though not all Android devices are equipped with the

required hardware. There is also camera support.

Historically, two areas where mobile applications have struggled to keep pace with their desktop

counterparts are graphics/media, and data storage methods. Android addresses the graphics

challenge with built-in support for 2-D and 3-D graphics, including the OpenGL library. The

data-storage burden is eased because the Android platform includes the popular open source

SQLite database. Figure 1 shows a simplified view of the Android software layers.

Figure 1. Android software layers

Application architecture

As mentioned, Android runs atop a Linux kernel. Android applications are written in the Java

programming language, and they run within a virtual machine (VM). It's important to note that

the VM is not a JVM as you might expect, but is the Dalvik Virtual Machine, an open source

technology. Each Android application runs within an instance of the Dalvik VM, which in turn

resides within a Linux-kernel managed process, as shown below.

Figure 2. Dalvik VM

 

An Android application consists of one or more of the following classifications:

Activities

An application that has a visible UI is implemented with an activity. When a user selects an

application from the home screen or application launcher, an activity is started.

Services

A service should be used for any application that needs to persist for a long time, such as a

network monitor or update-checking application.

Content providers

You can think of content providers as a database server. A content provider's job is to manage

access to persisted data, such as a SQLite database. If your application is very simple, you might

not necessarily create a content provider. If you're building a larger application, or one that

makes data available to multiple activities or applications, a content provider is the means of

accessing your data.

Broadcast receivers

An Android application may be launched to process a element of data or respond to an event,

such as the receipt of a text message.

An Android application, along with a file called AndroidManifest.xml, is deployed to a device.

AndroidManifest.xml contains the necessary configuration information to properly install it to

the device. It includes the required class names and types of events the application is able to

process, and the required permissions the application needs to run. For example, if an application

requires access to the network — to download a file, for example — this permission must be

explicitly stated in the manifest file. Many applications may have this specific permission

enabled. Such declarative security helps reduce the likelihood that a rogue application can cause

damage on your device.

Required tools

The easiest way to start developing Android applications is to download the Android SDK and

the Eclipse IDE. Android development can take place on Microsoft® Windows®, Mac OS X, or

Linux.

Coding in the Java language within Eclipse is very intuitive; Eclipse provides a rich Java

environment, including context-sensitive help and code suggestion hints. Once your Java code is

compiled cleanly, the Android Developer Tools make sure the application is packaged properly,

including the AndroidManifest.xml file.

It's possible to develop Android applications without Eclipse and the Android Developer Tools

plug-in, but you would need to know your way around the Android SDK.

The Android SDK is distributed as a ZIP file that unpacks to a directory on your hard drive.

Since there have been several SDK updates, it is recommended that you keep your development

environment well organized so you can easily switch between SDK installations. The SDK

includes:

android.jar

Java archive file containing all of the Android SDK classes necessary to build your application.

documention.html and docs directory

The SDK documentation is provided locally and on the Web. It's largely in the form of

JavaDocs, making it easy to navigate the many packages in the SDK. The documentation also

includes a high-level Development Guide and links to the broader Android community.

Samples directory

The samples subdirectory contains full source code for a variety of applications, including

ApiDemo, which exercises many APIs. The sample application is a great place to explore when

starting Android application development.

Tools directory

Contains all of the command-line tools to build Android applications. The most commonly

employed and useful tool is the adb utility (Android Debug Bridge).

usb_driver

Directory containing the necessary drivers to connect the development environment to an

Android-enabled device, such as the G1 or the Android Dev 1 unlocked development phone.

These files are only required for developers using the Windows platform.

Software Requirements

Android SDK

Eclipse

ADT Plugin

Tomcat Apache Server

Hardware Requirements

The Intel Pentium IV processor and above

Minimum of 2 GB RAM

Minimum hard disk capacity of 10 GB and above

Android Cell Phone

Languages

Java for Android

Java Servlets

Java Server Pages

JDBC

References

Websites:

http://www.java.sun.com

http://www.java.sun.com/j2ee

http://www.jguru.com

Books:

Advanced Programming for the Java 2 Platform by: Calvin Austin & Monica Pawlan.

Java 2 Complete Reference.

CodeNotes for J2EE by: Rob McGovern