I'm moving away from using KotterKnife in my apps,...

# android

[petermonteer]

I'm moving away from using KotterKnife in my apps, since support and development was withdrawn a while ago. With ViewBinding still in Canary, what alternatives are you using, what are your recommendations?

[jw]

It's in beta with RC around the corner

[sindrenm]

As Jake mentioned, it's still in beta. Alternatives could be Kotlin synthetic imports, but we've been using view bindings for a while in production with no issues. 😎

[petermonteer]

Yeah I've been using synthetics and it's been working fine, but it feels "unnatural" 😛 will be using it until view binding rc is released then, thanks guys! 👍

[Matej Drobnič]

If you are just starting with the project then it will likely be in stable when you will be releasing, so using Viewbinding is fine.

[Paul Woitaschek]

I found that ViewBinding (beta4) isn't ready yet; it fails to compile if you have includes in your layout from other gradle modules

[Paul Woitaschek]

Also you have to restart AS after every layout change because it's not picking up new layouts

[jw]

The former is already fixed. They branched 3.6 after the change and then i went on leave for two months.

[jw]

Never heard or seen the latter. File a bug.

[Matt Thompson]

you could start with the Data Binding library and not include variables in the xml, then the the main thing to change is the <layout> tag if/when you switch

[Matt Thompson]

speaking of which, are there any plans to deprecate that library since the two are so similar? or just choose whichever works best for your needs?

[petermonteer]

Taken from the official docs:

Differences from the data binding library

View binding and the data binding library both generate binding classes that you can use to reference views directly. However, there are notable differences:

The data binding library processes only data binding layouts created using the <layout> tag.
View binding doesn't support layout variables or layout expressions, so it can't be used to bind layouts with data in XML.

https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/view-binding

[Matt Thompson]

yeah I was just saying hypothetically you could use data binding for only the autogenerated bindings and not mess with the xml expressions/binding adapters and get the same thing view binding gets you, not saying you should. guess that's why the view binding library exists. no idea how the autogen compares/if one is more performant than the other

[petermonteer]

i think data binding is a little heavier, dont remember where i saw that

[jw]

it's heavier

[Remy Benza]

See my reply on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46482018/kotlin-android-view-binding-findviewbyid-vs-butterknife-vs-kotlin-android-exten/58155708#58155708

[Remy Benza]

For a good comparison between the different options

[Remy Benza]

And personal recommendations

[Paul Woitaschek]

It's weird that it has entered RC 1 with vital stuff like this open:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/142939794
Isn't RC mean to be "This might be finished and is a candidate for a release"?

[sindrenm]

I saw they fixed a number of things regarding view/data binding. Have you tried the RC and verified that yours is still an issue? Thinking it could be related to https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/140882631, perhaps, which is fixed in this RC. Could of course be very wrong, as well. 😅

[Paul Woitaschek]

Nope that's a different issue and the open issue is still reproducable on the rc1