Introduction to Jetpack compose

Published 26 April 2023

Android’s modern toolkit for developing native UI is called Jetpack Compose. It shortens and speeds up the UI development on Android which helps to get your apps to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs. It makes Android app designing faster and easier.



Here is the some reasons to use jetpack compose for UI designing for android

Benefits of Jetpack compose

1. Interpretive UI designing
In Jetpack compose, we can design the screen without fetching the elements and content from another screen. We can simply design the UI with functionality without any extra code to fetch the views from xml.
In xml we used data binding and view binding, which allows us to bind data directly to your views without writing extra code but this process itself is tiresome to set up the process.
Interpretive UI is when the state of the screen is predefined and when it listens to any changes made to the state then the UI elements get reloaded.

2. Recyclerview replaced by List View
In traditional Android development, ListView is one of the most commonly used UI components to display a list of items. With Jetpack Compose, however, there is a new and improved way to display lists called LazyColumn.
Jetpack Compose, we can expect to see even more powerful and innovative apps being built for the Android platform.

Disadvantages of Jetpack Compose

1 - The main downside of this solution is that it re-rendering previews each time when code changes and builds are not that fast. 2- Some features are still coming so some components are not supported.

Setup Instructions

Create an app using the Empty Compose Activity template. The default template already contains some Compose elements.

Example to write a function -

@Composable: This annotation specifies the following method is using Jetpack compose for creating views.
@Composable
fun Introduction() {
     Text(text = "Hello Compose")
}

@Preview: This annotation will be used to show the preview in android studio’s design section.
@Preview(showBackground = true)
@Composable
     fun Preview() {
       ProjectTheme {
          Introduction()
        }
     }

Few things to remember -
1- Compose function names should start with Capital letters.
2- We use padding instead of margin to define the spacing.
3- Compose works with Kotlin.

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Author

Akanksha - Software Developer