Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

For developers, Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. The goal of this book is to teach the skills necessary to develop Android-based applications using the Java programming language. This book begins with the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. An overview of Android Studio along with the architecture of Android is covered next, followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. You will also learn about the Android architecture components along with some advanced topics such as touch screen handling, gesture recognition, the recording and playback of audio, app links, dynamic delivery, the AndroidStudio profiler, Gradle build configuration, and submitting apps to the Google Play Developer Console. The concepts of material design, including the use of floating action buttons, Snackbars, tabbed interfaces, card views, navigation drawers, and collapsing toolbars are a highlight of this book. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, and cloud-based file storage; the foldable device support is the cherry on the cake. By the end of this course, you will be able to develop Android 11 Apps using Android Studio 4.1, Java, and Android Jetpack. The code files for the book can be found here: https://www.ebookfrenzy.com/retail/androidstudio41/index.php
Table of Contents (88 chapters)
88
Index

11.6 Choosing an Option

The introduction of view binding does not invalidate the previous options and both will continue to be widely supported for the foreseeable future. In terms of avoiding null pointer exceptions, however, view bindings are clearly the safer option when compared to using the findViewById() method. When developing your own projects, therefore, view binding should probably be used.

With regards to the examples in this book, however, it is important to keep in mind that view bindings are not enabled by default in Android Studio 4.1. Unfortunately, to use view bindings in the book examples it would be necessary to manually repeat each of the build.gradle and onCreate() method changes in this chapter over 50 times. For this reason alone, the examples in this book continue to use findViewById().

That being said, there is no reason why you should not follow the steps in this chapter to adapt the examples in this book to use view bindings if you wish to do so. In...