Jetpack Compose Streamlines Android Development

Jetpack Compose Streamlines Android Development

Jetpack Compose is Android’s newest UI toolkit is three fold combining a programming language, an IDE and a powerful UI framework. Jetpack Compose is a “modern UI toolkit designed to help you quickly and easily build beautiful apps across all Android platforms, with native access to the platform APIs. Bring your app to life with dramatically less code, interactive tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.”

Essentially Jetpack Compose includes Android Jetpack, which is a suite of libraries that work across all versions of the android platform. Kotlin is now part of Jetpack Compose. The app, Google Home, reduced lines of code by 80% and decreasedNullPointerExceptions by 33% since using Kotlin. Declarative APIs for building UI is another component of Jetpack Compose.

The Jetpack Compose alpha release includes:

  • Animations
  • Constraint Layout
  • Initial A11Y support
  • Input and Gestures
  • Interoperability with Views (start mixing Composable functions in your existing app)
  • Lazy Lists
  • Material UI components
  • Performance optimizations
  • Testing
  • Text and editable Text
  • Theming and Graphics
  • Window management

Also added: A number of new capabilities to Android Studio 4.2 canary, in close partnership with the JetBrains Kotlin team, to help you build apps with Compose:

  • Compose Code completion
  • Compose Preview Annotations
  • Deploy individual composables to any device
  • Interactive Compose previews
  • Kotlin compiler plugin for code generation
  • Sample Data API for Compose
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