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

Understanding the Declarative Paradigm

Jetpack Compose marks a fundamental shift in Android UI development. While the traditional view-based approach is centered on components and classes, the new framework follows a declarative approach.

In Chapter 1, Building Your First Compose App, I introduced you to composable functions, the basic building blocks of a Compose-based UI. In this chapter, we will briefly review how Android UIs are implemented with traditional classes and techniques. You will learn about some issues of this approach, and how a declarative framework helps overcome them.

The main sections of this chapter are set out as follows:

  • Looking at the Android view system
  • Moving from components to composable functions
  • Examining architectural concepts

We’ll start by looking at my second sample app, HelloView. It is a re-implementation of the Hello app from Chapter 1, Building Your First Compose App. HelloView uses views, an XML layout file,...