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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to write our first composables: top-level Kotlin functions that have been annotated with @Composable. Composable functions are the core building blocks of Jetpack Compose-based UIs. You combined existing library composables with your own to create beautiful app screens.

To use Jetpack Compose in a project, both build.gradle files must be configured accordingly. In this chapter, I showed you what these files should look like for a Compose app.

We also looked at how to preview and test a composable function. To see a preview, we can add the @Preview annotation. We also saw how to deploy composable functions and Compose apps to the Android Emulator or real devices.

In Chapter 2, Understanding the Declarative Paradigm, we will take a closer look at the differences between the declarative approach of Jetpack Compose and the imperative nature of traditional UI frameworks such as Android’s view-based component library.