I’ve recently been looking for something to create for Android, something that would be a challenge and not your usual pointless (iBeer/Flashlight yawn…) application. Being a fan of the Rightmove application for the iPhone (which sadly isn’t available for us Android users) I decided to see if it would be possible to create a version for Android, and it is!
I have (so far) created a total of 11 classes, ranging from displaying a user interface to classes which represent an estate agent branch. A main part of the application which the user will never see are the XML handler classes. These 3 objects parse the XML from Rightmove using the SAXParserFactory (Simple API for XML) object, If you’ve ever used this you will know its not the best way to parse XML (in my opinion) but never mind it works. These 3 objects deal with location lookups, property search results and property details and pass information back to other classes dealing with the user interface.
The user interface is quite simple at this stage, I’ve focused on getting the application to work before making it look pretty. The location lookup facility is fully functioning and will return a list of regions from Rightmove which could match that the user is searching for. The next step is to retrieve the properties for this region and display them to the user. At this stage there are no filters like those appear in the iPhone version but this can be added later.
The last step is when the user selects a property to view, this will create a new view that will be similar to that on the iPhone version. As you will see below it still needs a lot of work.
