Jet Pack Compose is a new framework (jointly developed by Google and JetBrains) that is Intended for creating user interfaces for Android applications.
Works exclusively with Kotlin and not with the Java programming language. This tool aims to help developers create applications faster, taking advantage of the "modern native Android user interface".
“Today we released version 1.0 of Jetpack Compose, Android's native, modern user interface toolkit to help you build better apps, faster. It is stable and ready to be adopted into production, ”said Anna-Chiara Bellini, Product Manager, in a blog post.
“We designed Compose to be faster and easier to create native Android applications. With a fully declarative approach, you simply describe your user interface and Compose takes care of the rest. When the state of the application changes, its user interface is automatically updated, which greatly simplifies the rapid creation of user interfaces. "
About Jetpack Compose
The application was in a beta version for five months and has officially reached version 1.0 and according to Google's words this version 1.0 is ready for use in production and offers the following key functions:
- Interoperability: Compose is designed to interact with your existing application. You can embed the Compose user interfaces in "Views" or "Views" in Compose. You can add a single button to a screen or keep the custom view you created on a compose screen.
- Jetpack integration: Compose is designed to integrate with the Jetpack libraries. With the integration of Navigation, Paging, LiveData (or Flow / RxJava), ViewModel, and Hilt, Compose works with your existing architecture.
- Material: Compose offers an implementation of Material Design components and themes, making it easy to create great-looking applications. The materials theme system is easier to understand and track, without having to go through multiple XML files.
- Lists: Compose's Lazy components provide a simple, concise, but powerful way to display lists of data efficiently, with a minimum of boilerplate text.
- Animación: Thanks to Compose's simple and consistent animation APIs, it is much easier for developers to enchant users of their application.
Now that Jetpack Compose is officially out of beta, Google has released its roadmap for future Compose features. To ensure that Compose is ready for developers to use, the framework comes with a variety of ready-to-use "Material design" components.
Google also previously announced that support for the new "Material You" will be available soon. Other things on the Jetpack Compose roadmap include full WearOS support, improved performance, and most surprisingly, the ability to create Android home screen widgets.
In addition to it It is mentioned that Compose also offers a specialized tool «Compose Preview», integrated with Android Studio "Arctic Fox". With this tool, the developer can get an idea of what their application looks like or certain changes without having to recompile their code. Similarly, the strings in your Compose application code can be changed and the results immediately become visible in your debugger without recompiling.
Also Google has prepared a comprehensive set of resources for developer teams. To get started with Jetpack Compose and use the latest tools that Google offers, simply update to the new version of Android Studio "Arctic Fox", which was released recently and that during its development period, Google added new functions such as Accessibility Scanner, Test Matrix, native support for Mac M1 and full support for Jetpack Compose.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can refer to the documentation, including guides on key APIs such as layouts, navigation or testing, developer usability or tool functionality, and videos.
Source: https://android-developers.googleblog.com