This app retrieves and displays the first page of Stackoverflow users. The example aims to be as close to production-ready-app as possible and it demonstrates various aspect of Android Design Patterns and provides an example of how each component interacts and communicates with eachother.

• Clone the project
• Import to Android Studio
• Compile and install to Android Emulator or Android devices with developer option enabled

Hmmm... I believe any one who develops on Android platform will ask the same question at some point:

Is Activity/Fragment a view or a controller?

In Android, Activity/Fragment can act both as View and Controller from a different angle and we can all agree that it is rather confusing. Using correct architecture pattern will simplify the answer.

This app uses MVP architecture pattern. Over the years of using all three architecture patterns, I find that MVP is good for Android development and MVVM is a good design for iOS app, which corresponding to the popularity of MVP among Android developers and MVVM among iOS developers.

MVP, in my opinion, is better for Android development because it decouples the View and the Model components which makes the app easy testable. Models and Views should not take over the resposibility of other component. In MVC, for example, views can have logic in them to communicate with Model and Model can have logic to communicate with View. In constrast, in MVP, Views only handle UI, Models only store data, and Presenters act as a middle men to connect between the UI and data.

MVVM is a very good pattern and it works nicely with reactive programming. My experience with MVVM comes from developing iOS app. I will take MVVM into consideration for further project.

Stackoverflow API requires an access token to get over the call limit for a single IP address. This project does not contain an access token so it is subjected to 300 call limits.

Jack Compiler is used in the project. I use it for ease of access to Java 8 without the need to add Retrolambda (required additional plugin). It will be deprecated in future version of Android Studio but Java 8 will also be natively supported so migrating from Jack Compiler is as easy as removing

jackOptions {
            enabled true
        }

• Retrofit & OkHttp: Handle all networking and caching. It also works with RxJava and Gson
• Glide: Loading and Caching Image. I specifically chose Glide over Picasso because it supports GIF. Fresco also supports gif but it is rather heavy.
• RxJava: Reactive programming. It also allows easy multi-threading with Schedulers
• Butterknife: View binding, remove findViewById boiler plate codes

Copyright (c) 2017 Vincent Ngo

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