Android 2020: Latest Developments

The world of Android development fundamentally changed over the past few years. Instead of writing simple activities and fragments and intents, now the preferred approach uses new classes like the Navigation component, the Room database, and the ViewModel class. Concurrency is now handled through Kotlin coroutines. In fact, Google now favors Kotlin over Java for Android development of any kind, and their newest libraries are developed in Kotlin first. The purpose of this talk is to demonstrate how Android applications are supposed to be written now, with the latest features and architectural models.

Google now recommends the Jetpack library as a way to accelerate development and reduce boilerplate coding. This talk will demonstrate how to take advantage of the library, as well as testing techniques, and more.

About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.

More About Kenneth »