Pattern "One Activity, Multiple Views": Advantages and Disadvantages

Pattern One activity, multiple views: Advantages and disadvantages

We cannot use TabActivity, ListAcivity, MapActivity. But there are some tricks to go without them.

You have to use MapActivity if you want to use MapView. You have to use PreferenceActivity if you want to use preference XML.

It is necessary to keep history by ourselves. But it's not so difficult to develop.

The difficulty in managing your own history will depend greatly on what the history needs to be. Implementing history for a simple wizard will be fairly easy. However, that is a particularly simple scenario. There is a fair amount of history management code in Android that you would have to rewrite for arbitrary other cases.

You also forgot:

#5. You will be prone to leak memory, because you will forget to clean up stuff, and Android will not clean up stuff (since it assumes that you will be using many small activities, the way they recommend).

#6. Your state management for configuration changes (rotation, dock, SIM change, locale change, multiple displays, font scale) will be more complicated because now you also have to figure out what extra stuff (e.g., history) need to be part of the state, and you have deal with all of them at once rather than activity-at-a-time.

#7. Having multiple entry points for your application becomes more challenging (e.g., multiple icons in launcher, app widget linking to some activity other than the main one, responding to etc.).

It's faster to change the content of current activity than to start another activity

For most modern Android devices, the speed difference will not be significant to most users, IMHO.

If we have only one activity-context it's simpler to find and solve problems with memory leaks

Except that you still have more than "one activity-context". Remember: your activity, large or small, is still destroyed and recreated on configuration changes.

What do you think about this pattern ?

Coase's "nature of the firm" theory says that businesses expand until the transaction costs for doing things internally become higher than the transaction costs for having other firms do the same things.

Murphy's "nature of the activity" theory says that the activity expands until the transaction costs of doing things internally become higher than the transaction costs for having other activities do the same things. Android developers will tend towards a "user transaction" model for activities -- things that are tightly coupled (e.g., steps in a wizard) will tend to be handled in single activity, and things that have little relationship (e.g., browse vs. search vs. settings vs. help vs. about) will tend to be handled in distinct activities.

To Fragment or not to Fragment - Nested Fragments against Activities. Why should I use more than one Activity?

First off, I will agree with you that it is possible to write a huge application using only one activity and nested fragments. That's the fun of software - you can achieve the same functionality using a variety of approaches. For me, the choice to use multiple activities comes down to my personal preferences for encapsulation, reusability, and testability.

If I have a widget that can be reused in other applications, I make it a Fragment. For example, my app features a "sync with server" button and I have created a custom Fragment that uses Progress Bars to visually show the synchronization process. It's easy to imagine another application being able to use this widget, so that's why I developed it as a Fragment.

If I am switching tasks within my app, such that the new task is conceptually independent of the previous task, then I use a new activity. For example, the first page of my app asks you to select a user. Once you've clicked on a user, I send you to the main menu for that user. This main menu for the user is displayed in a new activity.

Now let's imagine a large, complex app, and a team of developers assigned to develop that app. If the app can be divided into separate activities, it is conceptually very easy to divide up the tasks. Each activity is its own sandbox, so parallel development is simple and unit-testable. If there are any common needs, the team should still develop Fragments and reuse them, of course. I should add that code reuse does not happen often enough in software development, but if done right, there should be a lot of reusable Fragments.

Now suppose it is time to test the app. Your testing team can treat each activity as its own black box. This is easier to test than a single huge app that relies on a single activity and tons of nested fragments. This is especially important if a bug exists. If a bug exists that is not obvious, at least I know the scope of the bug is limited to a single activity out of many.

In summary, my guess is that you are developing your app as an individual, and therefore your development decisions do not affect anybody else. Your perspectives would likely change if you were developing an app with a larger team, and I hope my response makes a lot of sense in that light.

Why fragments, and when to use fragments instead of activities?

#1 & #2 what are the purposes of using a fragment & what are the
advantages and disadvantages of using fragments compared to using
activities/views/layouts?

Fragments are Android's solution to creating reusable user interfaces. You can achieve some of the same things using activities and layouts (for example by using includes). However; fragments are wired in to the Android API, from HoneyComb, and up. Let me elaborate;

• The ActionBar. If you want tabs up there to navigate your app, you quickly see that ActionBar.TabListener interface gives you a FragmentTransaction as an input argument to the onTabSelected method. You could probably ignore this, and do something else and clever, but you'd be working against the API, not with it.

• The FragmentManager handles «back» for you in a very clever way. Back does not mean back to the last activity, like for regular activities. It means back to the previous fragment state.

• You can use the cool ViewPager with a FragmentPagerAdapter to create swipe interfaces. The FragmentPagerAdapter code is much cleaner than a regular adapter, and it controls instantiations of the individual fragments.

• Your life will be a lot easier if you use Fragments when you try to create applications for both phones and tablets. Since the fragments are so tied in with the Honeycomb+ APIs, you will want to use them on phones as well to reuse code. That's where the compatibility library comes in handy.

• You even could and should use fragments for apps meant for phones only. If you have portability in mind. I use ActionBarSherlock and the compatibility libraries to create "ICS looking" apps, that look the same all the way back to version 1.6. You get the latest features like the ActionBar, with tabs, overflow, split action bar, viewpager etc.

Bonus 2

The best way to communicate between fragments are intents. When you press something in a Fragment you would typically call StartActivity() with data on it. The intent is passed on to all fragments of the activity you launch.

When using MVVM on Android, should each Activity have one (and only one) ViewModel?

You should have one ViewModel per View (Activity, Fragment or Custom View), with multiple LiveData, one for each logical unit. In the image one logical unit would be the user data, another logical unit would be the settings data, so you would have two LiveData exposed in the ViewModel.

These concepts can also be visible in the recommended app architecture google presented in the last Google I/O, where an Activity/Fragment has 1 ViewModel with multiple LiveData:

Singletons vs. Application Context in Android?

I very much disagree with Dianne Hackborn's response. We are bit by bit removing all singletons from our project in favor of lightweight, task scoped objects which can easiliy be re-created when you actually need them.

Singletons are a nightmare for testing and, if lazily initialized, will introduce "state indeterminism" with subtle side effects (which may suddenly surface when moving calls to getInstance() from one scope to another). Visibility has been mentioned as another problem, and since singletons imply "global" (= random) access to shared state, subtle bugs may arise when not properly synchronized in concurrent applications.

I consider it an anti-pattern, it's a bad object-oriented style that essentially amounts to maintaining global state.

To come back to your question:

Although the app context can be considered a singleton itself, it is framework-managed and has a well defined life-cycle, scope, and access path. Hence I believe that if you do need to manage app-global state, it should go here, nowhere else. For anything else, rethink if you really need a singleton object, or if it would also be possible to rewrite your singleton class to instead instantiate small, short-lived objects that perform the task at hand.

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