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, you have learned about key elements of component-centric UI frameworks. We saw some of the limitations of this approach and how the declarative paradigm can overcome them. For example, specialization takes place on a component level. If the framework is based on inheritance, the distribution of features to children may be too broad. Jetpack Compose tackles this with the modifier mechanism, which allows us to amend functionality at a very fine-grained level; this means that composables only get the functionality they need (for example, a background color).

The remaining chapters of this book are solely based on the declarative approach. In Chapter 3, Exploring the Key Principles of Compose, we will take an even closer look at composable functions and examine the concepts of composition and recomposition. And, as promised, we will also dive deep into modifiers.