Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin

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

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin

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

Overview of this book

Are you keen to get started building Android 11 apps, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help kick-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 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. Moving ahead, you'll get to grips with testing, learn how to keep your architecture clean, understand how to persist data, and gain 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 (17 chapters)
Preface
12
12. Dependency Injection with Dagger and Koin

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned how to fetch data, including lists of items and image URLs, from APIs, and how to load images from URLs. Combining that knowledge with the ability to display lists of items is the goal of this chapter.

Quite often, you will want to present your users with a list of items. For example, you might want to show them a list of pictures on their device, or let them select their country from a list of all countries. To do that, you would need to populate multiple views, all sharing the same layout but presenting different content.

Historically, this was achieved by using ListView or GridView. While both are still viable options, they do not offer the robustness and flexibility of RecyclerView. For example, they do not support large datasets well, they do not support horizontal scrolling, and they do not offer rich divider customization. Customizing the divider between items in RecyclerView can be easily achieved using RecyclerView.ItemDecorator...