Integrating Parse into an Android Chat app template

Lesson 3 takes an in-depth look that the Chatt App Templates Layouts that are provided in the App Template.

Android UI is created with XML, and we go into detail about the buttons, fields and views for all the chat views. This is really a set-up or overview lesson, as in the next lessons we'll be hooking our Parse API into these views. If you already understand the UI layouts, you can skim through this overview lesson.

In lesson 4 we take an in-depth look at the Android app code, specifically the Login, Register and UserList Java classes, and explain the key methods in each of these, and how they interact with the Parse backend.

In lesson 5 we finish looking over our Android app's key Java classes that enable us to chat, namely Chat.Java and Conversation.Java class. These are the classes that do the heavy lifting in the chat app, so we go into detail about what each method does.

Lesson 6 takes you through the whole Parse set up for a Chat mobile app. This is perhaps the most important lesson of all, so if you've skimmed the others, this is the one is worth focussing on!

We create our classes in Parse for our app to use, and set up all the required tables and add some data, then check that our data is getting pulled into our Android app.

In lesson 7 we finish everything off! We’ve added our Parse backend to the template, so it’s time to test it.

We go through:

• Running the app on Emulator
• Testing Register in app with Parse
• Running a 2nd device to live Chat between the two

Congratulations you’ve now got a live Android Chatt app running! We hope you’ve found the course interesting, and we’d love feedback about what you liked and what you’d like improved. Please email us, or tweet us at @myapptemplates. If you want to try your hand at adding a Parse backend to our complete Android Chatt app template, you can download it here.