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

Moving from components to composable functions

So far, I explained the word component by saying that it refers to UI elements. In fact, the term is used in quite a few other areas. Generally speaking, components structure systems by separating distinct portions or parts of them. The inner workings of a component are typically hidden from the outside (known as the black box principle).

Tip

To learn more about the black box principle, please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box.

Components communicate with other parts of the system by sending and receiving messages. The appearance or behavior of a component is controlled through a set of attributes, or properties.

Consider TextView. We set text by modifying the text property and we control its visibility through visibility. What about sending and receiving messages? Let’s look at Button. We can react to clicks (receive a message) by registering (sending a message) an OnClickListener instance. The same principle...