Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose

By : Thomas Künneth
Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose

By: Thomas Künneth

Overview of this book

Jetpack Compose is Android’s new framework for building fast, beautiful, and reliable native user interfaces. It simplifies and significantly accelerates UI development on Android using the declarative approach. This book will help developers to get hands-on with Jetpack Compose and adopt a modern way of building Android applications. The book is not an introduction to Android development, but it will build on your knowledge of how Android apps are developed. Complete with hands-on examples, this easy-to-follow guide will get you up to speed with the fundamentals of Jetpack Compose such as state hoisting, unidirectional data flow, and composition over inheritance and help you build your own Android apps using Compose. You'll also cover concepts such as testing, animation, and interoperability with the existing Android UI toolkit. By the end of the book, you'll be able to write your own Android apps using Jetpack Compose.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1:Fundamentals of Jetpack Compose
5
Part 2:Building User Interfaces
10
Part 3:Advanced Topics

Showing Views in a Compose app

Imagine you have written a View-based custom component for one of your previous apps—for example, an image picker, a color chooser, or a camera preview—or you would like to include a third-party library such as Zebra Crossing (ZXing) to scan Quick Response (QR) codes and barcodes. To incorporate them into a Compose app, you need to add the View (or the root of a View hierarchy) to your composable functions.

Let's see how this works.

Adding custom components to a Compose app

The ZxingDemo sample, shown in the following screenshot, uses the ZXing Android Embedded barcode scanner library for Android, which is based on the ZXing decoder. It is released under the terms of the Apache License 2.0 and is hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/journeyapps/zxing-android-embedded):

Figure 9.1 – The ZxingDemo sample

My example continuously scans for barcodes and QR codes. The decorated barcode view is provided...