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

Debugging Compose apps

The title of this section, Debugging Compose apps, may indicate major differences to debugging traditional View-based apps. Fortunately, this is not the case. On Android, all composable hierarchies are wrapped inside androidx.compose.ui.platform.ComposeView. This happens indirectly if you invoke the setContent {} extension function of ComponentActivity or if you deliberately include a composable hierarchy inside a layout (see Chapter 9, Exploring Interoperability APIs). Either way, in the end, ComposeView is displayed on screen—for example, inside an Activity or a Fragment. Therefore, all aspects regarding the basic building blocks of an Android app (activity, fragment, service, broadcast receiver, intent, and content provider) remain the same.

Of course, any UI framework advocates specific debugging habits. For example, the View system requires watching for null references. Also, you need to make sure that changes in state reliably trigger updates...