Learning Intentions and Activities

Opening a webpage is simple right? It should be, at least in my experience as a developer it is. You have an ancor tag and the ancor tag will then allow the user to click and be on their merry.

Android does it a little different and I am still learning why. In the tutorial, i had to create a button that when clicked would open up a webpage. Basically, I attached a method call to the button which would then execute the openWebPage function.

My understanding of this tutorial is that android uses intents to do common tasks. In this specific tutorial, we use an intent to open a webpage.

public void openWebPage(String url) {
    Uri webpage = Uri.parse(url);
    Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, webpage);
    if (intent.resolveActivity(getPackageManager()) != null) {
        startActivity(intent);
    }
}

Intent does more than just sanity checks and validation. According to android docs “

 Its most significant use is in the launching of activities, where it can be thought of as the glue between activities. It is basically a passive data structure holding an abstract description of an action to be performed.