Praat
Android mobile app built for the Android mobile application development course
Praat is a real-time group chat application for Android. The mobile app was developed to be used for our Android mobile app development course.
The app concept is simple and everyone understands how instant messaging works but at the core the app gives students the knowledge of how Android
apps are put together using the different Android components.
The app demonstrates the use of Activities, Fragments, Intents, Broadcast Receivers, Services, Networking and Rest APIs, Databases and
Persistence with Preferences and SQLite and Content Providers. These are the core components used to build any Android application.
Armed with this knowledge, the students are tasked with creating their own Android projects with the guidance of our instructors.
The Praat Android app also consists of a back-end server application written in NodeJS with a MongoDB database and running on Heroku PaaS platform.
The students are guided on how to deploy the backend server with one of the cloud platform providers. Most modern apps are built this way, they have a
back-end server running a REST API that is exposed to the mobile application. The REST API is either hosted internally or deployed in the cloud.
The Praat Android app also consists of a back-end server application written in NodeJS with a MongoDB database and running on Heroku PaaS platform.
The students are guided on how to deploy the backend server with one of the cloud platform providers. Most modern apps are built this way, they have a
back-end server running a REST API that is exposed to the mobile application. The REST API is either hosted internally or deployed in the cloud.
The source code for the mobile app is freely open source and is available on Github for anyone to use and also contribute back.
The Praat Android app source code is available here.