Every year innovations & technologies are entering the market to make designers' life easy. Declarative UI has become one of the most striking trends of recent years as it:
- Reduces the development cost.
- Help develop/improve developers' efficiency & skills.
- It makes it easier to focus on different platforms and devices with similar code.
As we all know, it took time for Google to build its UI framework. Before that, they finally released Jetpack Compose for native Android applications.
Declarative UI is an industrial trend
Imperative UI was a setup for a long time. It's not unexpected, it's robust, but it fails for complex reactive applications. Declarative UI showed incredible community adoption and improvement in execution, as Flutter and React.
Considering this, different frameworks began embracing this approach in no time, and Jetpack Compose has come into the spotlight. Unlike Apple, which delivered SwiftUI back in September 2019.
How Jetpack Compose is different from traditional UI creation
Starting from Java Swing and Win32, most UI is written in an imperative style.
It also applies to both Android and iOS UI development.
Developers used to develop a UI by describing how components respond to changes. We can update them later utilizing setters when a state changes.
React, Flutter, SwiftUI, and Jetpack Composeadopted an alternate strategy. You need to determine what the UI should introduce than how elements should get developed. The how part gets passed to the framework, and the entire method is called declarative UI.
Jetpack Compose advantages over traditional UI creations
Many specialized issues have been stacking up throughout the long term. Jetpack Compose is the best solution to this issue as:
Jetpack Compose is a complete redesign of Android UI built. It’s working from the beginning to support development quality and speed.
UI in Jetpack Compose is written in Kotlin, and some parts are developed in Java or XML. We can take advantage of Kotlin no matter what part of the application we’re creating.
Jetpack Compose has similarities with XML and vice versa.
It fits Uni-directional Data Flow (where state flows down and events flow up) as a Composable and accepted state.
Declarative UI creates immutable UI objects, dropping the need to write code and sync. This approach can level an entire class by minimizing bugs and reducing development costs.
Jetpack Compose supports Material Design components, themes, and animations. It allows developers to create beautiful user interfaces quickly.
An unbundled toolkit, so it doesn’t rely on platform releases as it was with the View Support library.
Jetpack Compose is designed from the ground up with MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architecture. MVVM architecture enforces a clear separation of concerns and makes code more maintainable.
Jetpack Compose is designed to improve developer productivity. Many software modules for Android get refactored out of the developer workload.
It solves various issues with UI being a different changeable element.
It utilizes Smart recompositions and implements a solitary layout pass. This eliminates XML issues, like View expansion.
Jetpack Compose has studied how user interfaces work, optimizing for the common scenarios. They are using data structures and algorithms to make the composition more dynamic looks.
Learn more about how to use Kotlin as a backend development
Downsides of Jetpack Compose
Currently, under the Learning phase: The method is unique since developers use it rarely. Also, it requires more time to get comfortable with the innovation.
Fewer tools support: It required time for most of them to take on the innovation. It’s new in the development market, so fewer tools are available currently.
Restricted community adoption: Currently, Jetpack Compose is turning out to be in trend. The vast majority of the groups will favor traditional UI with XML. As Kotlin didn't get fame immediately, Jetpack Compose will need years to turn out to be very much taken on.
Lack of documentation: A lot of issues are likely to be tackled by somebody. There are a lot of assets that can settle them all alone. Finding everything you want with Jetpack Compose is precarious. After the release, there will be more documentation emerging.
Wrapping Up!!
Declarative UI is a global trend. Both Web and Mobile are embracing this method. Google has clarified that Jetpack Compose is one of the leading and top priorities.
It will need a long time for the innovation to replace standard XML. Many developers will remain hesitant to switch to this method. The reason for this is unique and has yet restricted adoption.
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