Top 5 Android libraries every Android developer should know about
In the last year or so, Android development has really come of age. Android Studio with Gradle at its core is a dash of light after Eclipse. Besides that, there are quite a few open source libraries that we use on a daily basis. Here is a selection of five of our favorite ones and a list of links where you can find others. 1. GSON Gson is a Java library used for serializing and deserializing Java objects from and into JSON. A task you will frequently need to do if you communicate with APIs. We mostly use JSON because it’s lightweight and much simpler than XML. // Serialize String userJSON = new Gson (). toJson ( user ); // Deserialize User user = new Gson (). fromJson ( userJSON , User . class ); It also plays nice with the next library: 2. RETROFIT From their site: "Retrofit turns your REST API into a Java interface.” It’s an elegant solution for organizing API calls in a project. The request method and relative URL are added with a...