What is Android Jetpack?

In the last few years, android development has been moving at breathtaking pace. Features and tools are being released year in year out. This is making android development much easier and android apps more powerful and reliable. However we developers must also keep learning to stay in tune and enjoy these new features and tools.

Android engineers released Jetpack a few years back, a collection of libraries and tools that allow us write high quality maintenable applications. Jetpack easens some complex tasks and allow us avoid boilerplate code by guiding us to write apps with best practices in mind.

Making up the Jetpack is the androidx package. Thus Jetpack respects backward compatibility.Android documentation furthermore claims that it gets updated even more frequently than the android platform itself.

Advantages of Jetpack

1. Through Jetpack we get free management of intensive activities like background tasks, navigation and lifecycle. Through this we are allowed to focus our efforts on ideas and how to implement and not the nitty gritty of the framework.
2. Apps based on Jetpack are standing on a firm foundation due to the modern practices on which Jetpack components are built on. Thus they are less likely to crash or encounter memory leaks.
3. The components making up Jetpack are designed to seamlessly integrate with each other.You can use one, two or all of them. They are also designed to allow to take advantage of modern language features. Thus you end up becoming more productive.
4. Jetpack’s Arch Foundation components provide backward compatibility as well. Moreover you can use Kotlin if you so desire.
5. Jetpack’s Arch or Architecture allow you write easily testable code by employing modern best practices.Thus this easens maintenance.

Categories of Jetpack Components

Jetpack components are divided in the following categories:

1. Foundation Components
2. Architecture Components
3. Behavior Components
4. UI Components.

Let’s look at them one by one.

1. Foundation Components

According to Android’s documentation, these provide cross cutting functionality like backwards compatibility, testing and Kotlin language support.

They include:

2. Architecture Components

This category is probably the most flashy.
You may have already heard or used these components. Through arch components you can create highly robust, testable and maintenable apps.

They include:

Adding Architecture Components

Architecture Components are available from Google’s Maven repository. So go to your root level build.gradle and add the following:

allprojects {
    repositories {
        google()
        jcenter()
    }
}

NB/= Root level build.gradle is located in your project’s root folder.

Then you move to your app level(located in app folder) build.gradle and add the specific artifacts you need. Here is an example:

dependencies {
    implementation fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    // Room components
    implementation 'androidx.room:room-runtime:2.0.0'
    annotationProcessor 'androidx.room:room-compiler:2.0.0'
    // Lifecycle components
    implementation 'androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-extensions:2.0.0'
    annotationProcessor 'androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-compiler:2.0.0'

3. Behavior Components

In Behavior Components you get a more flexible integration with android services like notifications, permissions, sharing and assistant.

4. UI Components

Lastly we have UI Components. These are a set of widgets and helpers not only to easen the UI creation process but also make UI more modern.