Github Repositories Simple App

It is a real life example using the most updated tools and technologies to develop and implement a robust android application by using the new Android Jetpack implemented by some of S.O.L.I.D Principles and Clean Code Architecture.

Github Project

You can check the whole project here.

Gitflow Workflow

Working with teams can be quite challenging if there is no process in place to review and check code before it is merged, or more importantly to prevent ominous code from getting to production.

One important tool that can make collaboration with other developers hassle free, is a version control system. The most popular system is Git.

Git is a system used for tracking changes in files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people; it is primarily used for source code management in development. It is free, open source and it handles everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

So the idea is to have two major branches named Master and Dev which are linked to two environments: Staging (https://staging.exampleapi.com) and Production (https://exampleapi.com). Typically you should have your staging be an exact replica of your production environment.

Types of Branches :

• Master Branch is the production-ready version of our codebase which is automatically deployed to our production environment (https://exampleapi.com), with everything fully tested and checked. “Thou shall not touch this branch.”
• Dev Branch is where all feature branches are merged after pull requests have been thoroughly checked, fixed, and all tests are performed. Once all builds pass, this branch is deployed to the staging environment (https://staging.exampleapi.com) for QA and UATs.
• Release Branch should be created from the Dev branch for final audit eg: cleanup and remove comments, versioning etc. This branch is tagged, and then merged to both Master and Dev branches.

Tools and Technologies are Used

• Using Some Cool Tools from Android Architecture Components and Android Jetpack :
  • ViewModel is a class that is responsible for preparing and managing the data for an Activity or a Fragment. It also handles the communication of the Activity / Fragment with the rest of the application (e.g. calling the business logic classes).
  • LiveData is a data holder class that can be observed within a given lifecycle. This means that an Observer can be added in a pair with a LifecycleOwner, and this observer will be notified about modifications of the wrapped data only if the paired LifecycleOwner is in active state.
  • LifecycleOwner is a class that has an Android lifecycle. These events can be used by custom components to handle lifecycle changes without implementing any code inside the Activity or the Fragment.
  • Room is a Database Object Mapping library that makes it easy to access database on Android applications. Rather than hiding the detail of SQLite, Room tries to embrace them by providing convenient APIs to query the database and also verify such queries at compile time. This allows you to access the full power of SQLite while having the type safety provided by Java SQL query builders.
  • Paging makes it easier for you to load data gradually and gracefully within your app’s RecyclerView. Many apps consume data from a data source that contains a large number of items, but only display a small portion at a time. The Paging Library helps your app observe and display a reasonable subset of this data.
• Using Another Some Cool Tools and Libraries :
  • Retrofit is a REST Client for Android and Java by Square. It makes it relatively easy to retrieve and upload JSON (or other structured data) via a REST based webservice. In Retrofit you configure which converter is used for the data serialization. Typically for JSON you use GSON, but you can add custom converters to process XML or other protocols. Retrofit uses the OkHttp library for HTTP requests.
  • Chrome Custom Tabs give apps more control over their web experience, and make transitions between native and web content more seamless without having to resort to a WebView.
  • Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.
  • LeakCanary identifies an object that is longer needed and finds the chain of references that prevents it from being garbage collected. A memory leak is a programming error that causes your application to keep a reference to an object that is no longer needed. As a result, the memory allocated for that object cannot be reclaimed, eventually leading to an OutOfMemoryError crash.
  • Timber is  an API for Android’s Log class. It basically enhances the logs from Android. We do that by plating a Tree, and each time we log something, the behaviour may change depending on which Tree implementation end up been called. But here we used Timberkt since this library builds on Timber with an API that’s easier to use from Kotlin. Instead of using formatting parameters, you pass a lambda that is only evaluated if the message is logged.
  • Glide is a fast and efficient open source media management and image loading framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface.

Project Structure

The Guide to App Architecture proposes an architecture with the following main components:

• A local database that serves as a single source of truth for data presented to the user and the actions the user has taken to change that data.
• A web API service.
• A repository that works with the database and the API service, providing a unified data interface
• A ViewModel that provides data specific for the UI
• The UI, which shows a visual representation of the data in the ViewModel

So, our app follows the architecture recommended in the Guide to App Architecture, using Room as local data storage. Here’s what you will find in each package:

• api - contains Github API calls, using Retrofit
• db - database cache for network data
• data - contains the repository class, responsible for triggering API requests and saving the response in the database
• ui - contains classes related to displaying an Activity with a RecyclerView
• model - contains the Repo data model, which is also a table in the Room database; and RepoSearchResult, a class that is used by the UI to observe both search results data and network errors

The Paging library works with all of these components and coordinates the interactions between them, so that it can page content from a data source and display that content in the UI :

• PagedList a collection that loads data in pages, asynchronously. A PagedList can be used to load data from sources you define, and present it easily in your UI with a RecyclerView.
• DataSource and DataSource.Factory a DataSource is the base class for loading snapshots of data into a PagedList. A DataSource.Factory is responsible for creating a DataSource.
• LivePagedListBuilder builds a LiveData<PagedList>, based on DataSource.Factory and a PagedList.Config.
• BoundaryCallback signals when a PagedList has reached the end of available data.
• PagedListAdapter a RecyclerView.Adapter that presents paged data from PagedLists in a RecyclerView. PagedListAdapter listens to PagedList loading callbacks as pages are loaded, and uses DiffUtil to compute fine grained updates as new PagedLists are received.

Architecture Used

The following diagram shows all the modules in our recommended architecture and how they interact with one another:

The main players in the MVVM pattern are:

• The View that informs the ViewModel about the user’s actions. It is the actual user interface in the app. It can be an Activity, a Fragment or any custom Android View.
• The ViewModel exposes streams of data relevant to the View. It is a model for the View of the app: an abstraction of the View. The ViewModel retrieves the necessary data from the DataModel, applies the UI logic and then exposes relevant data for the View to consume.
• The DataModel  abstracts the data source. The ViewModel works with the DataModel to get and save the data. It exposes data easily consumable through event streams  like  RxJava’s Observables or LiveData as we used here in our app. It composes data from multiple sources, like the network layer, database or shared preferences and exposes easily consumable data to whomever needs it. The DataModels hold the entire business logic.

CI and CD

Before started explaining What is what? Lets introduce todays era buzz word DevOps. What is DevOps? This term are not specific to android only. They are generic we can use them with any of the technology.

Working on the big organisation and enterprise app development. Working with large teams in agile process it could be very hard to track the development progress, code integration, code review and deployment process. Always learn from the past experience thats the best way to gain the experience and improve your self.

CI is Continuous Integration, a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early. CD is Continuous Deployment or Delivery. By integrating regularly, you can detect errors quickly, and locate them more easily.

Pros of CI and CD :

• CI reducing the risk and overheads.
• Defects are detected and fixed sooner.
• Analysing and Reporting.
• Automated Testing, you can do pre commit and post commit testing, pre deploy, post deploy testing.
• Code control and code versioning.
• Prevent wrong commits, missing file and resource while committing code.
• It will reduce efforts, time and money.
• Build automation.
• Deployment Automation.

So, in our project we used CircleCi for Continues Integration and Fastlane for Continues Deployment and Delivery.