The bones of the chat app

Now we have the skeleton of an Application, but we want to make it do things.

Our Goals

We will be building a simple chat application. It will give us experience with adding UI elements, accepting user input, and communicating with a server.

There are three main components of a chat app that we will be adding.

1. A send button
2. A text input box
3. A list of messages

We will start by adding the button. It will teach us how to add a UI element and also show us how to do something when a button is pressed.

Next we will add a text input box. This will teach us how to accept user input and also how to interact with UI elements from Java code.

Finally, we will be adding a way to list messages. We will learn about efficiently loading elements in a list, the adapter pattern, and how to map data to UI elements dynamically.