Book Image

Kickstart Modern Android Development with Jetpack and Kotlin

By : Catalin Ghita
5 (1)
Book Image

Kickstart Modern Android Development with Jetpack and Kotlin

5 (1)
By: Catalin Ghita

Overview of this book

With Jetpack libraries, you can build and design high-quality, robust Android apps that have an improved architecture and work consistently across different versions and devices. This book will help you understand how Jetpack allows developers to follow best practices and architectural patterns when building Android apps while also eliminating boilerplate code. Developers working with Android and Kotlin will be able to put their knowledge to work with this condensed practical guide to building apps with the most popular Jetpack libraries, including Jetpack Compose, ViewModel, Hilt, Room, Paging, Lifecycle, and Navigation. You'll get to grips with relevant libraries and architectural patterns, including popular libraries in the Android ecosystem such as Retrofit, Coroutines, and Flow while building modern applications with real-world data. By the end of this Android app development book, you'll have learned how to leverage Jetpack libraries and your knowledge of architectural concepts for building, designing, and testing robust Android applications for various use cases.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring the Core Jetpack Suite and Other Libraries
7
Part 2: A Guide to Clean Application Architecture with Jetpack Libraries
13
Part 3: Diving into Other Jetpack Libraries

Understanding how apps communicate with remote servers

Modern applications need to show real content that can change over time and need to avoid hardcoding data, as we did in the previous chapters. Let's briefly cover how they do that.

Most network-connected apps use the HTTP protocol to send or receive data in the format of JSON from REST web services through a REST API.

That's a lot of words we've just thrown at you, so let's break them down:

  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol for asynchronously fetching various resources from web servers. In our case, the resources are the data that our application needs to display.
  • JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is the data format of the content that's transferred in HTTP requests. It's structured, lightweight, and human-readable as it consists of key-value pairs that are easy to parse and commonly used as a suitable format for data exchange between apps and web servers. In our app...