navigator-demo

Using Navigator library to rewrite the Conductor Demo App.

Notable Libraries Used

• Anko - DSL to write layouts in code rather than in xml
• Simple Stack - backstack library for simpler navigation between views, fragments, or whatevers

Anko

• Pros
  • Easier to create layouts through DSL - No xmls. Yay?
  • Faster
  • No more findViewById or ButterKnife
• Cons
  • No preview (they have a plugin, but I can't make it work)
  • Styles - Styling is not really hard if you create your own, but when using appcompat styles, I needed to look for it's exact styles to mimic them

• I really think kotlin android extensions is better in terms of ease of use but programmatic views are faster and you wouldn't need to code in xml anymore

Simple Stack

• Pros
  • It's simple. Like a simplified flow.
  • You have granular control on your lifecycle. Double edged. But I prefer it, all bugs could be blamed by me.
  • Screens are just ViewGroups
• Cons
  • Multiple Child view with backstack support is hard but I don't think there's a lot of use case for it. Did not continue to implement Multiple Child Routers like in the Conductor demo as it was too hard and I felt like hacking already

• Simple Stack is nice and simple and I prefer it over Flow or Conductor. Flow is complex and Conductor, I'm just not sure on what happens internally on its lifecycle and I wanted to avoid that like how I'm avoiding fragments now.

Building Blocks

• ViewKey
  • This interface has lifecycle callbacks and it's the key to use to add to the backstack.
• ViewLayout
  • This abstract class is the xml. Everything UI or View related is here.
• ViewStateChanger
  • The code I copied mostly from the DefaultStateChanger of Simple Stack. I wanted to support the ViewLayout class instead of inflating from xml. Lifecycle callbacks are called here, we have full control of the lifecycle here.