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 MVC, MVP, and MVVM as presentation patterns

In the beginning, most Android projects were designed as a bunch of Activity or Fragment classes that were setting content to their corresponding Extensible Markup Language (XML) layouts.

As projects grew and new features were requested, developers had to add more logic inside the Activity or Fragment class, development cycle after development cycle. This means that anything from a new feature, improvement, or bug fix for a particular screen would have to be done inside those Activity or Fragment classes.

After some time, these classes became larger and larger, and at some point, adding an improvement or fixing a bug could become a nightmare. The reason for this would be that the Activity or Fragment classes were burdened with all the responsibilities from within a particular project. These classes would be doing the following:

  • Defining the UI
  • Preparing the data to be displayed and defining different UI states...