App architecture: High Level Design

[RitikaPahwa4444]

[psh]

A few high-level thoughts -

• Agree 100% that Compose is the right way to build a modern UI
• Unit test methods arent really testing anything unless they assert something!
• gson is wildly outdated in a kotlin based world. When I evaluated performance for my employer, we found that kotlinx.serialization out performed Moshi so we chose kotlinx.serialization
• Definitely go with coroutines / Flow instead of RxJava - the kotlinx-coroutines-rx2 provides a nice bridge back if you want to go stepwise in that direction
• MVVM vs MVI is a up for debate, but let's agree that "unidirectional data flow" is the foundation whichever paradigm we go with. On iOS the Viper architecture has some nice abstractions where it moves navigation out of the viewmodel/presenter - BEWARE that viper is MVP not MVVM
• We'll be most of the way to a working Commons app for iOS if we use Compose Multiplatform (which has the same API as regular Compose)
• I worked through breaking out "db", "api", "repository" and "app" modules in our current app and the biggest hurdle was mixing on-the-wire models with database entities with UI models ... it feels like work but there are big benefits to keeping those separate from each other (dont leak your DB and JSON parsing annotations into the rest of the app). For example - WikiSite is an API model (contains an @SerializedName annotation) but its also Parcelable - mixing the UI into the data-layer of the app.
• If we want KMP, low-level API classes should have no Android dependencies (ie, Context or Parcelable)
• I am preparing to migrate my company to using Google's Compose navigation v3 (from nav 2) - great API and it nicely decouples things!
• I'd love to know what Material Expressive could do for modernizing the Commons App UI

[RitikaPahwa4444]

Codex or Material Design (or hybrid!) - we can decide. Ref: https://doc.wikimedia.org/codex/latest/

We'll have to provide a way to consume the tokens from Codex, Material Design might be straightforward.

[rohit9625]

Is there any specific reason to adapt to Codex? I think using MD will make the UI pretty decent, and the colors already look refreshing to me. However, the dark theme is definitely not that good.

[RitikaPahwa4444]

Is there any specific reason to adapt to Codex?

To keep it consistent with Wikimedia's branding. If we want to convince Wikimedia to officially support an iOS app, aligning with their design system sounds better.

[rohit9625]

Hmm, that make sense. I don't know much about the Codex. Does it support integration with Jetpack Compose? Is it a library?

[RitikaPahwa4444]

No official library @rohit9625 , more details: #6627 (comment)

Plus we can check the official Wikipedia Android app on how it makes use of a hybrid approach.

I'd shared my thoughts here: #6392

[rohit9625]

Got it. Thanks :)

[rohit9625]

Just one more doubt. If we follow the Codex design system, then do we have to change the color theme as well?

[RitikaPahwa4444]

Yes @rohit9625