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

Using coroutines for async work

The first thing that we have to do is identify the async/heavy work that we have done in our Restaurants application.

Without looking at the code, we know that our app retrieves a list of restaurants from the server. It does that by initiating a network request with Retrofit and then waits for a response. This action qualifies as an async job because we don't want to block the main (UI) thread while the app waits for the network response to arrive.

If we check out the RestaurantsViewModel class, we can identify that the getRestaurants() method is the one place in our application where heavy blocking work is happening:

private fun getRestaurants() {
    restaurantsCall = restInterface.getRestaurants()
    restaurantsCall.enqueue(object : Callback
        <List<Restaurant>> {
            override...