#Popular Movies, Stage 2

Popular Movies is an Android app built for the Udacity course

Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals.

It shows data on popular movies from themoviedb.org.

##Features New to Popular Movies, Stage 2

• Scroll through a grid of over 200,000 movie posters!
• Read reviews of movies
• Easily build a list of your favorite movies; browse and sort it offline
• Play Trailers
• Share trailers with friends on many social media outlets!
• Now supports Android Tablets - Classy master/detail view in portrait and landscape!
• Now follows Android's beautiful new Material Design guidelines

###Several features have been added which aren't part of the Udacity Course

Sort movies by:

• Latest Releases
• Highest Gross (not supported in cache)
• Primary Release Dates (Newest and Oldest)
• Alphabetical

Filter movies by

• Number of ratings
• Date Released
• Genres

Other Novelties!

• Good behavior generally when offline, movies cached in a database
• Reset settings to defaults

###The following concepts, technologies and libraries were used in Popular Movies, Stage 2:

• Android Studio 2.0 preview versions 3-7 with Amazing instant changes.
• SQL Lite Database
• Content Providers
• OkHttp
• GSON
• AppCompat
• Loopj
• httpcore
• cursors/cursor adapters
• cursor loaders
• Android Test
• junit
• ShareActionProvider
• Callbacks

##Features in Popular Movies, Stage 1

• Scroll through a grid of 20 movie posters for themoviedb.org
• Sort movies by popularity or rating
• See details about movies: Release Date, Average Rating, Overview

###The following Android concepts, technologies and libraries were used in Popular Movies, Stage 1:

• Custom ArrayAdapters
• Percelables and SaveInstanceState()
• HTTP Networking / AsyncTask
• JSON Parsing
• Shared Preference
• Portrait/Landscape Layouts
• GridView
• Picasso (Graphics downloading Library)
• Gradle
• Android Studio 2.0 (preview) and emulators
• Preferences
• logging/debugging

##Building and Running

In order to get this project to build and run, you'll need an API key from themoviedb.org.

First, sign up to themoviedb.org https://www.themoviedb.org/account/signup

Once signed in, you'll get to the main page https://www.themoviedb.org/account/[your account name]

Chose API from the menu on the left. Drill down to create an API key.

Next, add your API key to the code by adding the following to your ~/.gradle/gradle.properties file:

MyTheMovieDbApiKey="[Your API key]"

In your build.gradle (Module: app) these lines will reference that key:

buildTypes.each{ it.buildConfigField 'String', 'THE_MOVIE_DB_API_KEY', MyTheMovieDbApiKey }

##This app is incomplete. Here's what it still needs:

• A way to delete data in the cache
• Attribution to themoviedb.com in an About page
• A sane way of keeping track of how movies got into the cache so that they can be filtered and sorted more effectively. Currently, a lot of highest rated movies show up in the most popular list, which makes no sense. I need to find out what sorting criteria themoviedb uses or mark the origin in the database as movies are fetched from the network.
• A lot of productionizing; strings, google play, google properties integration
• Better use of material design

##Some self-criticisms

###I tried to do too much

• Having an offline cache for all movies instead of just favorites added a lot of complexity
• Offering so many kinds of sorting and filtering also lead to a lot of code bloat

###Test coverage is low, leading to a lot time lost quenching weird bugs

• I need to learn Dagger and how to automate UI testing, on real devices in particular
• I didn't use tdd, so a lot of cruft built up. I probably could have gotten away with it if I hadn't tried to support so many features and technologies. Nah, who'm I kidding.
• I'm dying for something like NCrunch to keep me honest

###Many design choices are less than optimal

• I had to forego cursor loaders because of various conflicts with jloop I couldn't resolve. In retrospect, while this cut down on code and some classes, it added a lot of code to handle varous concurrency issues.
• I used several different async libraries to test them out; in practice, I should use the one that's most appropriate to my needs.
• GSON/GSON Format are powerful, but I need to find or build a cleaner way to combine them with data providers and parcelables and database fields that aren't in the original JSON
• The concurrency model used is clunky overall. This is a result of a combination of my unfamiliarity with Android when I started and using different async libs.
• The MoviesFragment class shold be factored out into several classes, one for managing network mode, another for handling cache mode, and a third for managing interaction. There's too much coupling between the data fetching, database code, drawing the UI and handling interaction. Most of this would never have materialized had I been using tdd.
• Use of meterial design is poor

###I made poor use of git/github

• Checkins and pushes were seldom logical units
• I didn't make effective use of branching, especially near the beginning

###Android Studio 2.0 preview

• Great for-round tripping UI tweeks and small logic changes
• Painful for Gradle changes, emulator weirdness and test environment breaks