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Comment by zserge | Hacker News Reader

You might like Anvil: it's a declarative react-like UI library for Android. I personally use it a lot, and I normally write single-activity applications (e.g. I have my own backstack of views inside a single activity):

https://github.com/zserge/anvil

http://zserge.com/blog/anvil-2.html

Kotlin is supported as well (http://zserge.com/blog/anvil-kotlin.html)

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Apps like that are a pain. No matter how you reach it you end up on a infinite stream of things you don't care anymore and have to keep pressing back.

I think yelp is written as that. And to add insult when they moved to the material hype the home button on top left became yet another back button... they did add shortcuts on the left now. But it's all breaking stuff and adding bandaids on top of bandaids

Looks really promising, thanks for the hint. It's on my to-evaluate list along with: http://robobinding.github.io/RoboBinding/

Also, if you're open to Xamarin, there's a great library there called MvvmCross that gives you in-AXML databinding and a general feel similar to Angular.

Thanks!

Unfortunately neither of the data binding libraries for Android worked for me, because they are either too hard to extend or too big/complex.

RoboBinding's idea is nice, but to me it's too implicit. It's really hard to tell what's happening behind the scenes.

As for the Xaramin - I would like to try it, but I run linux on my development machine, and it didn't start with Wine.

The "magic" nature of databinding seems unavoidable. Either it's driven by reflection and then it's more or less understandable but the performance suffers. Or, the bindings can be generated through some kind of bytecode weaving or code generation, which are both opaque to some degree. Either way it's hard to debug and possible to screw up performance, and I've yet to see an implementation without such tradeoffs. But in the end I think it's worth it for the architectural wins.

Anvil looks really promising. I wonder why doesn't it use "linearLayout {}" instead "v<LinearLayout> {}" syntax?

I'd guess because Anvil began as a Java project, and Kotlin is what provides the sugar that allows Anko to provide a nice DSL.

Almost correct. I never thought of this kind of syntax sugar initially. But technically (and people posted an issue about it) it's possible to generate functions like linearLayout() etc from android.jar for Anvil/Java. This will work with Anvil/Kotlin as well.

I plan to keep v<Class> anyway because it works nice with custom views when there is no generated syntax sugar.

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