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

Testing and Debugging Compose Apps

Programming is a very creative process. Implementing great-looking user interfaces (UIs) with slick animations is pure fun with Jetpack Compose. However, making an outstanding app involves more than just writing code. Testing and debugging are equally important because no matter how carefully you design and implement your app, bugs and glitches are inevitable, at least in non-trivial programs. Yet there is nothing to fear, as there are powerful tools you can wield to check whether your code is acting as intended.

This chapter introduces you to these tools. The main sections included are listed here:

  • Setting up and writing tests
  • Understanding semantics
  • Debugging Compose apps

In the first main section, I will walk you through important terms and techniques regarding testing. We will set up the infrastructure, write a simple unit test, and then turn to Compose specifics—for example, createComposeRule() and createAndroidComposeRule...