Android App Development 101 5th tutorial; Android and Web, Turn your Web Site into an Android App!

In this tutorial, I will be using Android WebView to display my blog in our android app. Web View is very straight forward and offer several features. We will be looking at few of them. At first we need to make a layout in xml with our WebView object, then we will load our url into the layout.

activity_main.xml


<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
 android:orientation="vertical"
 >

    <WebView
        android:id="@+id/webview"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent"
      />

</LinearLayout>


MainActivity.java


package com.example.webview;

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.view.KeyEvent;
import android.webkit.WebView;
import android.webkit.WebViewClient;

public class MainActivity extends Activity {
WebView ourwebView;
@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
loadWeb();
}

public void loadWeb() {
WebView webView = (WebView)findViewById(R.id.webview);
ourwebView=webView;
this.setTitle("Android Happenings");
ourwebView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient());
String url="http://androidhappenings.blogspot.com/";
ourwebView.canGoBack();
ourwebView.loadUrl(url);

}


public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
if (keyCode==KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK && ourwebView.canGoBack()) {
ourwebView.goBack();
return true;

}
return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}


}

As we can see in the above java code, the onKeyDown method checks for back presses and move our web view one page back in each back press whenever possible. Also make sure that you add internet permission in your manifest or it will display web page not found error.
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />