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

Introducing the Jetpack Navigation component

The Navigation component is Jetpack's solution to navigation within Android apps. This library allows you to easily implement navigation between the screens of your application.

To promote a predictable user experience and consistent manner of handling app flows, the Navigation component adheres to a set of principles. The two most important principles are as follows:

  • The application has a fixed start destination (screen) – this allows the application behavior to be predictable because the app will always present this destination first, no matter where it is being launched from.

In our Restaurants application, we plan to set the start destination as our existing screen with the list of restaurants (represented by the RestaurantsScreen() composable function). In other words, this is the first screen that the user will always see when launching the app from the Android launcher screen.

  • The navigation state...