Data Binding

Much of our responsibility as software engineers is based upon problem-solving, we are required to use our knowledge of available tools, and our experience, to find the most appropriate solution to a given problem. That’s what I’d like to focus on here, on finding the most appropriate solution. More often than not, the solution to a problem can be quite simple and doesn’t require over-engineering, which is perhaps where the age-old KISS and YAGNI principles come from. ...

Android Data Binding is a support library that allows us to bind UI components to data sources declaratively rather than programmatically, it’s potentially really powerful and complex, but used effectively it can really cut down on presentation boilerplate. We started off with Data Binding beta in 2015 when Google announced it after Google IO as a support library that can be used right back down to Android 2.1 which is API version 7, to write declarative layouts and minimise the glue code required to use your application logic in layouts. ...

Android Databinding is considered as both a powerful toolchain, empowering your views with access to view data without the necessity to build cumbersome presenters, and conversely as an overly complex, convoluted mess of binding statements opening the door to unnecessary, irresponsible domain logic in your view layouts. Whilst the latter of these statements can be true, Databinding offers a very powerful code generation syntax, allowing you to utilise the power of the compiler to ensure that your binding statements are runtime safe. Combining this with the concise syntax afforded by Kotlin allows us to dramatically cut down on boilerplate and build complex user interfaces with relative ease. ...