FYI: Great new tutorial on CBL with Android Recycler Views

[Jens Alfke]

Our mobile evangelist James Nocentini just wrote a terrific tutorial on how to use Couchbase Lite to drive Android L’s new Recycler View, including animations for rows being added & removed. Looks like a must-read for CBL Android developers.

If there’s one big take away from the Android L release is that motion matters. Movement can teach a user what something can do and where it came from. By using motion we can teach users how the system behaves and what they can expect from that system.

Recycler View is a base for new adapter backed views. It has more flexible APIs for the large datasets that you would traditionally use a ListView for. For example, you can now notify the adapter when items are specifically added, removed rather than saying "hey, my dataset changed". That way we can benefit from animations when adding, removing items to the set.

In this tutorial, you will use a RecyclerView to display a list of restaurants in London. You will use the Google Places API to import documents to Sync Gateway. The information you will be displaying on the screen are the restaurant name, address and thumbnail.

—Jens