Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

By : Thomas Künneth
5 (1)
Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Thomas Künneth

Overview of this book

Compose has caused a paradigm shift in Android development, introducing a variety of new concepts that are essential to an Android developer’s learning journey. It solves a lot of pain points associated with Android development and is touted to become the default way to building Android apps over the next few years. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect all changes and additions that were made by Google since the initial stable release, and all examples are based on Material 3 (also called Material You). This book uses practical examples to help you understand the fundamental concepts of Jetpack Compose and how to use them when you are building your own Android applications. You’ll begin by getting an in-depth explanation of the declarative approach, along with its differences from and advantages over traditional user interface (UI) frameworks. Having laid this foundation, the next set of chapters take a practical approach to show you how to write your first composable function. The chapters will also help you master layouts, an important core component of every UI framework, and then move to more advanced topics such as animation, testing, and architectural best practices. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to write your own Android apps using Jetpack Compose and Material Design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals of Jetpack Compose
5
Part 2: Building User Interfaces
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Showing Views in a Compose app

Imagine you have written a View-based custom component for one of your previous apps—for example, an image picker, a color chooser, or a camera preview—or you would like to include a third-party library such as Zebra Crossing (ZXing) to scan Quick Response (QR) codes and barcodes. To incorporate them into a Compose app, you need to add the View (or the root of a View hierarchy) to your composable functions. Let’s see how this works.

Adding custom components to a Compose app

The ZxingDemo example, shown in the following screenshot, uses the ZXing Android Embedded barcode scanner library for Android, which is based on the ZXing decoder. It is released under the terms of the Apache-2.0 License and is hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/journeyapps/zxing-android-embedded):

Figure 9.1 – The ZxingDemo example app

Figure 9.1 – The ZxingDemo example app

My example continuously scans for barcodes and QR codes. The decorated barcode view...