When it comes to storing application data in a database on Android, there’s not much of a choice the developer has. First of all, there is SQLite as the only officially recommended solution in Android framework. On top of SQLite, there is a number of ORM (Object-relational mapping) frameworks available which aim at allowing developer to work directly with objects when storing and reading data from a database. SQLite is however sometimes not so easy to use and there are some drawbacks due to not being designed specificaly for mobile devices. Luckily, there is another kind of database gaining on popularity lately — the Android Realm database.
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Enable Java 8 features in Android with these libraries
Since Android N, some of the Java 8 language features are finally supported thanks to the new Jack & Jill compiler toolchain. This however comes with several limitations like for example an inability to use the new compiler along with the data binding support library or limited annotations support. But that doesn’t mean that you should give up on advanced language features of Java 8 at all. In this post, I’ll introduce you to a way how to enable Java 8 features in Android by using four libraries back-porting Java 8 functionality to lower Java versions.
New Date and Time API in Java 8
Handling time and date in Java has always been somewhat complicated. At least until the new Date and Time API was published along with Java 8 release. Before that, developers had to struggle with not so great java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar classes which both had their flaws. In this post, a third in a series introducing new Java 8 language features (see Java 8 Stream API and Lambda expressions tutorial posts), I’m going to present the new Date and Time API in Java 8 and explain why it’s a much better choice than previous date and time APIs.
Improve your code with Android Annotations support library
Annotations have been a part of Java programming language since JDK version 1.5. Since then, they have constantly gained on popularity and nowadays you probably couldn’t find a class that doesn’t use at least one annotation in its code. There is also a support library available, providing several useful annotations to be used in Android development. In this post, which is the first post of the Android Annotations series, we’ll have a look at what the annotations from Android Support library have to offer.
GreenDAO: A fast Android ORM database
When it comes to persisting data on Android, the officially recommended way is to use the SQLite database. Even though the Android framework provides some kind of support in form of the helper classes, the developer still has to struggle with writing raw SQL queries and manually transforming objects to records in the database. This is where Android ORM database libraries come to give a helping hand.
Stream API in Java 8
Continuing the series of Java 8 language features tutorial, after introducing lambda expressions in one of the previous posts, let me present the new Stream API in Java 8 in this post.
Lambda expressions in Android (part 2/2)
In the previous post, lambda expressions in Java 8 have been introduced. In this post I will describe how to enable and use Java 8 language features including lambda expressions in Android development.
Until recently, only Java 7 was officially supported when developing for Android. However, this changes with the release of Android N (Nougat, API version 24) and its official support for Java 8. Before Android N was released however, it was also possible to use an external library called retrolambda which allows to bring lambda expressions support to Java 7 and lower.
Lambda expressions in Java 8 (part 1/2)
Java 8 brought many new features known up until now mainly from functional programming languages. Among the most interesting ones, there are lambda expressions, default methods, stream API, etc. In this post, let me introduce you to the first of listed — lambda expressions.
