Brett Tucker

Google I/O 2023

This post will be a summary of all the talks I thought were the most interesting from this year's Google I/O event. Since I work as an android dev professionally you'll probably notice a theme in the talks I decided to write about here :) I'll include a link to

Generating Twirp clients using Square's Wire and Retrofit

In this post we'll explore how we can make use of square's wire library & gradle plugin to generate some retrofit interfaces that are capable of making calls to twirp services from an android app. If you'd like to see a simple sample project using all the pieces that we'll discuss

Common microservice patterns with Resilience4j

In this post I want to explore a few ideas that are useful to keep in mind when building a distributed system using a library called Resilience4j. We'll look at three concepts: * Rate Limiters * Bulkheads * Circuit Breakers I'll explain the idea behind each of these concepts, when you would want

Google I/O 2022

Another year has gone by and that means another Google I/O has come and gone with lots of new announcements.(It also means I'm due for at least one new blog post right?) This post will be a summary of all the android related talks from the event along

Markdown with Markwon

In this post we'll explore using the Markwon library to display markdown documents inside of an android app. The library comes with excellent documentation and it works its magic on textviews so we won't need any webviews! We'll explore the library's major features by using one of our previous blog

A Koin Operated Repo Browser

In this post I want to take a look at the less sharp and more round DI framework that gets a lot of use in android projects: Koin Koin bills itself as being light weight with no magic. It doesn't do code generation and it doesn't do reflection. I was

Proguard 101

I wanted to write about every android developer's favorite code shrinking and obsfucation tool: Proguard. I know that when I was first learning to develop on android that information on what Proguard was, how it worked, and how you can configure it were sparse. There are lots of stackoverflow posts

Ktor 1.0 - Revisiting our Christmas list service

Last Christmas I looked into a beta version of the Ktor framework and used it to create a really simple restful API. The API allowed you to create "users", "wishlists" and "wishlist items". You can find the project on github and read the accompanying post here. It's Christmas time again

Exploring the new Java 11 HttpClient

Java 11 is hot off the press and it comes with a brand new HttpClient class. Say good-bye to fussing with HttpUrlConnections! Let's dive right in by having a look at how we go about creating one and then we'll explore how to make requests. The HttpClient class uses the

Android WorkManager

Google announced the WorkManager library at I/O 2018 and in this month's post we'll explore the API and see how we can use it to handle some of the most common background work scenarios. You can see code examples in this post's companion project here Doing work in the

Dagger2 And ViewModel Injection

In this post I'll go over how you can bring dagger2 injection to your android app's view model objects. I'll also briefly cover how to make this work in a multi module android project in case you've started to break your app into modules in preparation for a more dynamic

An updated look at the Paging Library

The paging library has come a long way since I first wrote about it last September. It recently had a 1.0 release and so I thought now would be a good time to review. We'll go over whats changed and give an example of how to use each of

No More notifyDataSetChanged()

Let's take a look at the magic of DiffUtil in this month's post. What is DiffUtil? It is a simple class that can help you calculate exactly what items have changed whenever you need to update a RecyclerView adapter. Why would you want to do this? So that your RecyclerView

Containerized Payara with a Google Cloud SQL JDBC resource

In this post we'll explore how we can use docker to automatically setup the Payara application server with a jdbc resource that will securely communicate with a Google Cloud SQL instance and then auto deploy a war file. We'll make use of payara's pre and post boot script files to

Exploring Java 9's Module System

Java 9 came out a few months ago and it has brought some of the biggest changes to the Java language in a very long time. In this post we will take an introductory look at the new module system Java 9 delivered to us. We'll explore the module system

A Kotlin Christmas List Service

Let's look at ktor, a new web app framework being developed to take advantage of all the awesome that Kotlin has to offer. In the spirit of the Christmas season I figured we could explore this framework by building a Christmas wishlist web service. The framework is still under heavy

Simple and Sane Video Playback in Android

This month's blog post is a little late so November will hopefully end up with two posts :). Let's look at how quickly and easily we can build a minimum viable video playing app in Android using the ExoPlayer library. ExoPlayer is an open source media player that was built on

Getting Started With The Paging Library

Update: The paging library has changed a lot since this post. If you want to see an updated example based on the 1.0 release, then click here Android development just keeps getting easier. Google has now released another Architecture Components library and this time it is aimed at making

Android CI with Jenkins and Firebase Test Lab

Repeatable tested builds are essential to delivering a high quality android app that your users will love. We will look at how we can achieve repeatable tested builds using Jenkins and Firebase Test lab in this month's post. We will even configure our process to be kicked off by a

Dagger2 Android Injection

Dagger2's 2.10 and 2.11 updates brought Android developers a new set of APIs designed to make injecting Android components even easier. This post will explore how you can take advantage of these new classes and remove some injection boilerplate from your Android components. I am going to assume

Android Lifecycle and Room

Google I/O 2017 was last month and it included a lot of really awesome announcements, especially in the Android world. We'll explore one of those announcements in this blog post as we dive into the Lifecycle and Room libraries released by Google. Let's begin by taking a look at

Docker swarm with compose files

In a previous post we showed how you can create compose files to launch multiple dockerized web services at once. We even created a little set of services that were "load balanced" behind a dockerized instance of nginx. In that post though everything was run on a single machine so

Android shared element transitions

In this post we will look at how you can create shared element transitions in the android framework. You can see a simple project making use of shared element transitions here. The first thing we'll need to do is make sure that our project supports transitions. We can do this

An intro to Java8 lambdas and streams

In this post we are going to walk through a brief introduction to Lambdas and streams in Java8. Let's begin by transforming an anonymous inner class into a lambda expression and finally a method reference. class Example { public void example(){ Runnable myRunnable = new Runnable() { @Override public void run() { System.out.

Creating a restful web service with SparkJava, Dagger2 and Gradle

In this post we are going to learn how to create a restful web service using SparkJava, Dagger2, and Gradle. If you're an android developer like I am then you probably recognize Dagger2 and Gradle, but let's go over what each of these pieces of technology will give us. * SparkJava