navigator-demo

Using Navigator library to rewrite the Conductor Demo App.

Notable Libraries Used

Anko - DSL to write layouts in code rather than in xml
Simple Stack - backstack library for simpler navigation between views, fragments, or whatevers

Anko

Pros
- Easier to create layouts through DSL - No xmls. Yay?
- Faster
- No more findViewById or ButterKnife
Cons
- No preview (they have a plugin, but I can't make it work)
- Styles - Styling is not really hard if you create your own, but when using appcompat styles, I needed to look for it's exact styles to mimic them

I really think kotlin android extensions is better in terms of ease of use but programmatic views are faster and you wouldn't need to code in xml anymore

Simple Stack

Pros
- It's simple. Like a simplified flow.
- You have granular control on your lifecycle. Double edged. But I prefer it, all bugs could be blamed by me.
- Screens are just ViewGroups
Cons
- Multiple Child view with backstack support is hard but I don't think there's a lot of use case for it. Did not continue to implement Multiple Child Routers like in the Conductor demo as it was too hard and I felt like hacking already

Simple Stack is nice and simple and I prefer it over Flow or Conductor. Flow is complex and Conductor, I'm just not sure on what happens internally on its lifecycle and I wanted to avoid that like how I'm avoiding fragments now.

Building Blocks

ViewKey
- This interface has lifecycle callbacks and it's the key to use to add to the backstack.
ViewLayout
- This abstract class is the xml. Everything UI or View related is here.
ViewStateChanger
- The code I copied mostly from the DefaultStateChanger of Simple Stack. I wanted to support the ViewLayout class instead of inflating from xml. Lifecycle callbacks are called here, we have full control of the lifecycle here.