Android Google Study Jams Brussels Episode 2

Written on March 10 2015.

We are now at week 6 of the google study jam in Brussels. Things have been smooth so far. We are a core group of attendees with different backgrounds and goals, which is always nice.

This week's lesson was about Content Provider and the URI concepts. Most of the questions were about the utility of this way of doing and we talked quite a lot about the different strategies to load data into an application.

Here are the links about the tools and libraries people have mentioned:

• greenDAO, an ORM which adds a build step into the build process: you write a java program that runs on your computer and that generates your model classes with all the machinery to let you query them.
• Sprinkles, a lightweight library around SQLite. It provides a mapping with your model object throughout Java annotations. It's quite simple to setup and does not hide the SQL complexity: you write your query by hand and it provides the object mapping. This is the one I currently use for my projects.
• sqlite-analyzer, written by Novoda, it can generates Java code from sqlite migration/databases. Pretty handy.
• sqlite-provider, simplifies the use of sqlite with ContentProvider.
• android-content-provider-generator, mentioned by an attendee (hi Maxime!), this library generates a ContentProvider from a JSON file that describes your model.

All in all, the most important lesson is that people should use what they're comfortable with. Choosing a persistence strategy is something that you should think about. Using external libraries that are far from the android way of doing also conveys a certain risk (e.g., library maintenance).

We also had a question about how to do animations and how to read/manipulate SVG objects. This is also a large topic but here are a few pointers:

• Romain Guy's blog post about path tracing and SVG. The companion app is something that you want to clone.
• Android SVG a library to manipulate SVG
• Some blog post about animating the Toolbar while scrolling: Arnaud Camus and Michał Z. Both have Github example projects.
• A very good presentation by Daniel Lew about all the different options you have to do animations on android. Some stuff are dated but it's a good start.
• A blog post on the official Android developer blog about ViewPropertyAnimator.
• There's an app that aggregates a lot of open source library and most of them have demos. It's quite nice if you need to find something: Libraries for Developers.

Once again, if you're interested and want to participate, join the Google Developer Group Brussels on Meetup!