Weather app

• App name is MyWeather

• The whole app was developed using Android Studio 4.0

• For searching by zip code, only zip code in US is supported. Seems like this API is only for US only.

• Completed tasks from 1 to 4

• Known Issues and possible solution: The city list JSON file is too big so on my emulator it takes around 7 seconds to load. The bottleneck is json deserialisation.
  ** Convert json to csv and only keep the id, name, country field. The file size will be much smaller and csv format is easier to parse than JSON format. ** Create a big java list with all the data already initialized. No need to read the json file and parse it.

• code design:

  • A lot of code comes from https://github.com/android/architecture-components-samples/tree/master/GithubBrowserSample/
  • The csv will be loaded in a big list and then get sorted, then we can use binarysearch to find the matched city name by the first several characters. Such match operation will take much longer(around 40ms on my emulator) without using binarySearch and compare one by one in the list of more than 20,000 elements. It takes less than 1ms with binarySearch.*
  • Because the weather data comes from serveral APIs, MediatorLiveData is used to handle different sources of Live Data
  • The communication between WelcomeSearchFragment and RecentSearchFragment is not ideal. Currently from RecentSearchFragment we need to pass the query information back to WelcomeSearchFragment after recent search is clicked. With navigation component it will look better.

• Choices of app libraries:

  • Android + kotlin + Androidx libraries
  • Network layer: Retrofit2 + OKHTTP + Moshi
  • Dependency injection: Koin
  • Gps location permission: easypermissions and play-services-location
  • Preference library 'com.scottyab:secure-preferences-lib:0.1.7' and implementation "com.f2prateek.rx.preferences2:rx-preferences:2.0.0" with the ability to save object in and get object from preferences.
  • Glide: to load weather icon file
  • Test libraries ** mockk: simple mock library ** mockwebserver: to test if the response can be parsed

• Use of UI paradigms: MVVM + liveData + Data binding