/countries-of-the-world

Primary LanguageJava

Countries of the World for Android

This is a simple app to get basic information about several countries of the world

About the App

Countries of the World is an app made as a task which is part of the application process at Rebtel

Requirements for the assignment

  1. Select Country
  2. Display Country's Information
  3. Show Country's Flag
  4. Use REST Countries API

Development process

Based on the given requirements, I made a list of thing that I think this app should have. I will list them below.

  • RecyclerView: My first idea was to make a list of flags. For that, I used the RecyclerView and the CardView since they work very well together, besides they are very flexible, making the layout task easier.

  • Volley: Since the REST API needed to be accessed, I chose Volley as a library to perform the network operations. I chose this mainly because I had worked with it before.

  • Butter Knife: to make view binding simpler and the code a little bit cleaner.

  • Unit testing: for better quality of code, allowing less bugs and side effects.

  • Fragments: to show the country's information, a fragment is created containing a few informations from the API.

  • Check and Request permissions at runtime for API 23+

  • Present the user with a few error messages as a feedback in case something go wrong.

  • Search View: as the user iteracts with the list, since it is a big one, I thought it would be better to have a Search View for better UX.

  • Separete classes in different packages: this help any developer to understand better the code. The organization of a MVC-like structure is vry familiar and easy to understand.

The whole process was thought to be like a Sprint in SCRUM, since I wanted to finish in a few days.

In the last day, I decided to add a MapBox map to the app to make it more interesting to use. For that, I got a limited access token, which I believe anyone who can run the code will be able to use it.

For the environment, I used Ubuntu with Android Studio as IDE. For testing, I used a Samsung Galaxy Note 5.

Conclusion

Despite being a simple app, the openness of the requirements made me think about what is really important to showcase while developing an Android app. For the most part, I believe all the requirements were fulfilled and the quality of the development is good enough to suit the team needs.