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

Exploring Retrofit as an HTTP networking client for Android

For the application to obtain data from our database, we need to implement an HTTP client that will send network requests to the REST API of the database.

Instead of working with the HTTP library provided by default by Android, we will use the Retrofit HTTP client library, which lets you create an HTTP client that is very easy to work with.

If you plan to develop an HTTP client that interfaces with a REST API, you will have to take care of a lot of things – from making connections, retrying failed requests, or caching to response parsing and error handling. Retrofit saves you development time and potential headaches as it abstracts most of the underlying complexity associated with handling network requests and responses.

In this section, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using Retrofit
  • Adding Retrofit to the Restaurants application
  • Mapping JSON to model classes
  • Executing GET requests...