Book Image

Simplifying Android Development with Coroutines and Flows

By : Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

Simplifying Android Development with Coroutines and Flows

By: Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Coroutines and flows are the new recommended way for developers to carry out asynchronous programming in Android using simple, modern, and testable code. This book will teach you how coroutines and flows work and how to use them in building Android applications, along with helping you to develop modern Android applications with asynchronous programming using real data. The book begins by showing you how to create and handle Kotlin coroutines on Android. You’ll explore asynchronous programming in Kotlin, and understand how to test Kotlin coroutines. Next, you'll learn about Kotlin flows on Android, and have a closer look at using Kotlin flows by getting to grips with handling flow cancellations and exceptions and testing the flows. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to build high-quality and maintainable Android applications using coroutines and flows.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Kotlin Coroutines on Android
6
Part 2 – Kotlin Flows on Android

Summary

In this chapter, you revisited the concept of asynchronous programming. We learned that asynchronous programming helps you execute long-running tasks in the background without freezing the app and annoying your users.

You then learned about various ways you can do asynchronous programming in Android, including with threads, AsyncTask, and Executors. We also learned that they allow you to perform tasks in the background and update the main thread. AsyncTask is already deprecated, and threads and Executors are not the best ways to carry out asynchronous programming in Android.

Finally, you were introduced to the new, recommended way to carry out asynchronous programming in Android: with Kotlin’s Coroutines and Flow. We learned that Coroutines is a Kotlin library that you can use to easily perform asynchronous, non-blocking, and long-running tasks in the background. Flow, built on top of Coroutines, allows you to handle functions that return multiple values over time.

In the next chapter, you will dive deeper into Kotlin coroutines and learn how to use them in your Android project.