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

Examining architectural aspects

In the Component hierarchies section, I showed you that component-based UI frameworks rely on specialization. General features and concepts are implemented in the root component or one of its immediate successors. Such general features include the following:

  • Location and size on screen
  • Basic visual aspects such as background (color)
  • Simple user interactions (reacting to clicks)

Any component will provide these features, either in a specialized way or in its basic implementation. Android’s view system is class-based, so changing functionality is done by overriding the methods of the parent.

Composable functions, on the other hand, do not have a shared set of properties. By annotating a function with @Composable, we make certain parts of Jetpack Compose aware of it. But besides not specifying a return type, composables seem to have few things in common. However, this would have been a pretty short-sighted architectural...