Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By: Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Looking to kick-start your app development journey with Android 13, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help jump-start your Android development practice. This book starts with the fundamentals of app development, enabling you to utilize Android Studio and Kotlin to get started with building Android projects. You'll learn how to create apps and run them on virtual devices through guided exercises. Progressing through the chapters, you'll delve into Android's RecyclerView to make the most of lists, images, and maps, and see how to fetch data from a web service. You'll also get to grips with testing, learning how to keep your architecture clean, understanding how to persist data, and gaining basic knowledge of the dependency injection pattern. Finally, you'll see how to publish your apps on the Google Play store. You'll work on realistic projects that are split up into bitesize exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. You'll build apps to create quizzes, read news articles, check weather reports, store recipes, retrieve movie information, and remind you where you parked your car. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to build your own creative Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Android Foundation
6
Part 2: Displaying Network Calls
12
Part 3: Testing and Code Structure
17
Part 4: Polishing and Publishing an App

Essential Libraries: Retrofit, Moshi, and Glide

In this chapter, we will cover the steps needed to present app users with dynamic content fetched from remote servers. You will be introduced to the different libraries required to retrieve and handle this dynamic data.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to fetch data from a network endpoint using Retrofit, parse JSON payloads into Kotlin data objects using Moshi, and load images into ImageView using Glide.

In the previous chapter, we learned how to implement navigation in our app. In this chapter, we will learn how to present dynamic content to the user as they navigate around our app.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introducing REST, API, JSON, and XML
  • Fetching data from a network endpoint
  • Parsing a JSON response
  • Loading images from a remote URL