Architecture Components were announced to much fanfare at Google I/O 2017, as it finally gave Android developers some official guidance on how to architect their applications. It also gave us tools to make managing lifecycle changes much easier, and to persist data without writing lots of annoying SQLite boilerplate code. By now we’ve all read the documentation and tutorials, but how easy is it to use these intriguing new tools in a production application? (Spoiler alert: they’re pretty helpful)
I developed an app from scratch using all of the new Architecture Components – ViewModels and an MVVM architecture, Room to persist all the local data, and LiveData objects to easily and safely update the UI with automatic lifecycle handling. Join us as we discuss in detail what it’s like to use these new Architecture Components in a real world situation – we’ll talk about the problems they solved, the problems they created, and whether or not they’re the right choice for your next project.