Introducing the Sampler Projects

It is time to move past what Android Studio gives you by default for a new project and start seeing how we can add our own stuff to these projects.

To that end, this book has a pair of Android Studio projects that contain the code samples that will be shown in the remainder of the book. You are welcome to download one or both of these projects to be able to run the samples on your own devices or emulators.

The Projects

The two projects are very similar, in terms of the Android SDK features that they demonstrate. The primary difference: one is in Kotlin, and the other is in Java. The resources, manifests, and much of the Gradle build files will be the same, but the source code will be in the programming language for the project:

• Sampler is in Kotlin
• SamplerJ is in Java

This way, you can choose which project to work with, based on which programming language you want to use for your initial Android work. In general, the rest of the book will show you both the Java and the Kotlin editions of the code, so you can compare and contrast the two languages and Android’s support for each. In particular, if you are new to Kotlin, these corresponding samples can help you see how Java approaches get translated into Kotlin. Note that there will be a few samples in the latter half of the book that are Kotlin-only.

These two projects are hosted on GitLab:

• The Java project is at: https://gitlab.com/commonsguy/cw-jetpack-java
• The Kotlin project is at: https://gitlab.com/commonsguy/cw-jetpack-kotlin