Data binding, DiffUtil, and architecture

GDE and author Erik Hellman is coming over from Sweden, and Jon Hancock will join us remotely from California.

18:15 Pizza and drinks

18:30 Introduction

18:45 Data binding beyond findViewById replacement by Kevin Pelgrims

Data binding is not yet widely used by Android developers, and those who do use it seem to limit themselves to just replacing findViewById. However, the possibilities of data binding are endless, and with the right architecture, your code can be much cleaner and a lot easier to understand.

This talk begins with explaining the basics of data binding, and then quickly moves on to more advanced techniques & functions.

19:30 DiffUtil Demystified by Jon Hancock (remote)

RecyclerView has marvellous built-in animations for changing datasets, but to take advantage of those, you cannot simply call notifyDatasetChanged() on your adapter. You must use the new methods that tell the adapter exactly what changed. This would be a tedious and error-prone task except for a fantastic tool called DiffUtil. Using DiffUtil effectively can be challenging though so we’ll cover how to diff your data, handle threading, and apply the diff result.

20:30 Living the hype - MVVM with RxJava by Erik Hellman

Unless you’ve just started with Android development or been avoiding any blog posts, video tutorials or even tweets about Android, you have probably heard about the two biggest hypes in Android; RxJava and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel design pattern). The first is the framework promising us an end of callback hell and smoother handling of async operations, while the second guarantees that our code is well designed and easy to test. Sounds almost too good to be true!

In this talk we will go through the why and how of using RxJava together with MVVM. Everything from loading data, to state management and how to wrap existing APIs will be covered.