Credit: Dreamstime
Google's Jetpack Compose toolkit for the Android mobile platform has moved to a beta stage of release.
The declarative UI toolkit is designed to speed up the process of building native apps across Android platforms. Declarative Kotlin APIs are featured for building responsive apps with less code.
With the Jetpack Compose beta, the developers have focused on ensuring API completeness and that all foundational APIs are in place. Work will continue on stabilising the APIs. The beta is supported by the latest Canary release of Android Studio Arctic Fox IDE.
Directions for getting started with Jetpack Compose can be found at developer.android.com. The version 1.0 production release is due later this year.
Capabilities added since the alpha release, which arrived last summer, include support for coroutines; accessibility support for the TalkBack screen reader and a new API for Animation, this is in addition to views interoperability; material UI components; input and gestures; window management and a DSL-based constraint layout.
Jetpack Compose is designed to work seamlessly with Android Views and allow developers to adopt the new toolkit at their own pace. Integration with common libraries, such as ViewModel, is intended to help developers add Jetpack Compose to existing applications without the need to re-architect.
The Jetpack Compose toolkit is built in Kotlin. JetBrains, the developer of Kotlin, has built its own desktop UI framework for Kotlin, Jetpack Compose for Desktop, which is based on the Google Jetpack Compose toolkit.
