Integrating Application with Intents

Written in collaboration with Michael Burton, Mob.ly; Ivan Mitrovic, uLocate; and Josh Garnier, OpenTable.

OpenTable, uLocate, and Mob.ly worked together to create a great user experience on Android. We saw an opportunity to enable WHERE and GoodFood users to make reservations on OpenTable easily and seamlessly. This is a situation where everyone wins — OpenTable gets more traffic, WHERE and GoodFood gain functionality to make their applications stickier, and users benefit because they can make reservations with only a few taps of a finger. We were able to achieve this deep integration between our applications by using Android's Intent mechanism. Intents are perhaps one of Android's coolest, most unique, and under-appreciated features. Here's how we exploited them to compose a new user experience from parts each of us have.

Designing

One of the first steps is to design your Intent interface, or API. The main public Intent that OpenTable exposes is the RESERVE Intent, which lets you make a reservation at a specific restaurant and optionally specify the date, time, and party size.

Source: Android Developers Blog