Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Kotlin as an Android-compatible programming language is becoming increasingly popular. Fully updated for Android Studio 4.0, this book will teach you the skills necessary to develop Android-based applications using Kotlin. Starting with the basics, this book outlines the steps necessary to set up Android development and testing environments, and goes on to introduce you to programming in Kotlin. You’ll practice Java to Kotlin code conversion and explore data types, operators, expressions, loops, functions, as well as the basics of OOP in Kotlin. You’ll then learn about Android architecture components and advanced topics, such as intents, touchscreen handling, gesture recognition, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication. As you make progress, you’ll explore Android Studio 4.0’s key features, including layout editor, direct reply notifications, and dynamic delivery. You’ll also delve into Android Jetpack and create a sample app project using ViewModel, the Android Jetpack component. Finally, you will upload your app to Google Play Console and model the build process using Gradle. By the end of this Android book, you’ll be fully prepared to develop applications using Android Studio 4.0 and Kotlin.
Table of Contents (97 chapters)
97
Index

18.6 Choosing an Option

The introduction of view binding does not invalidate the previous options and both will continue to be widely supported for the foreseeable future. In terms of avoiding null pointer exceptions, however, view bindings are clearly the safer option when compared to using the findViewById() method. When developing your own projects, therefore, view binding should probably be used.

With regards to the examples in this book, however, it is important to keep in mind that view bindings are not enabled by default in Android Studio 4.0. Unfortunately, to use view bindings in the book examples it would be necessary to manually repeat each of the build.gradle and onCreate() method changes in this chapter over 50 times. For this reason alone, the examples in this book continue to use synthetic properties.

That being said, there is no reason why you should not follow the steps in this chapter to adapt the examples in this book to use view bindings if you wish to do...