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

Chapter 2: Understanding the Declarative Paradigm

Jetpack Compose marks a fundamental shift in Android UI development. While the traditional view-based approach is centered around components and classes, the new framework follows a declarative approach.

In Chapter 1, Building Your First Compose App, I introduced you to composable functions, the basic building blocks of a Compose-based UI. In this chapter, we will briefly review how Android UIs are implemented with traditional classes and techniques. You will learn about some issues of this approach, and how a declarative framework helps overcome them.

The main sections of this chapter are as follows:

  • Looking at the Android view system
  • Moving from components to composable functions
  • Examining architectural concepts

We'll start by looking at my second sample app, Hello View. It is a re-implementation of the Hello app from Chapter 1, Building Your First Compose App. Hello View uses views, an XML layout...