Designing the Architecture of Your Android Application: Crucial Criteria to Follow
Owning an application has become a priority today. With the continually changing market scenario, businesses are now desperate to hold the leading position by leaving their possible competitors behind through any technological or strategic upgrade they can use. With a mobile app like product hunt and many more are replacing the primary business operations, it has become necessary for the businesses to own their business dedicated application to compete on the same level as their competitors are.
Therefore, it has initiated a great competition among the popular technologies being used for developing an application also. With Android being the most popularly used operating system in smartphones, it has begged the most significant market share. It is leading the market with its supportive features like being an open-source technology. Therefore, the development is also proceeding with greater numbers in Android app development. With more developers and technology enthusiastic jumping towards Android development, there is fierce competition in the development and as well as greater chances of success.
Why Architecture Matters?
With the great competition out there, it becomes important to develop your Android games as well as android applications to be excellent to stand tall among all your adversaries. As it is said, “Well begun is half done.” Same in the case of application development, starting off with great architecture and following the principles leads to an excellent application that is appropriate in every way. Therefore, it becomes important for you to know all the aspects of architecture before finalizing on one. Each architecture holds its own significance in the development and hence must be used wisely.
Popular Architectures Used in Android Applications
There are numerous architectures to follow. However, a few have made their name in the market by offering maximum output within limited functionality and making it possible for the developers to unlock the full potential of the architectural benefits. Here are all popular architectures and their benefits listed down to help you choose the best one suiting your requirements.
Layered (n-tier) Architecture
As most of the applications follow the database tables for storing and retrieving data, layered architecture is the most popular one among all the available options. MVC architecture (Model View Controller), is a great example of layered architecture. In a layered architecture, the code of the application is arranged in layers where the data enters layer by layer and gets stored or fetched accordingly. The technologies like Java EE, Express JS are built to follow the layered architecture which lands many applications following this architecture only.
Each layer of the architecture focuses on an assigned role, and hence it makes it more result-oriented as each layer is dedicated to fulfilling a specific purpose. It is specially used for applications that reflect the traditional processes of the specific industry. Also, it supports faster application development.
Microkernel Architecture
This architecture supports the applications that are having a set of core operations that are run when specific data or information related to a task is entered. Therefore, the features supported through the core operations (or, say, background processes!) are called plug-ins. And hence this architecture is also known as plug-in architecture. This architecture puts emphasis on constructing the basic functions that run redundantly and use the calling function when a particular basic function is required to implement the extended feature.
Event-Driven Architecture
A system built to handle the data and provide data to the appropriate functions who complete the required operation on the data follows the event-driven architecture. Data is sent to the function only if the data is required to be processed. Therefore, the system waits for an event to occur, and according to that, actions are taken. This is the primary concept of event-driven architecture. There are many applications developed following the event-driven architecture, among which network applications hold a major share.
JavaScript is the best language facilitating event-driven operations. Therefore, the webpages having event-driven functions are including JavaScript code in them to facilitate event handling. Also, the development companies always ask for knowledge on this particular architecture when they hire an android developer as this architecture defines itself differently from the traditional layered architecture through passing required data among the related functions.
Microservices Architecture
Instead of building an entire application, microservice architecture asks to develop it by separate modules and at last merge all the modules together to construct the final application. Microservices architecture focuses on delivering the application as a merged output of different components programmed differently. It allows better productivity achieved by making it easy to conduct testing on the small chunks of code rather than on the entire code togetherly.
Therefore, MicroServices architecture supports and encourages better development of the application which can lead your app to business success. The application having independent modules chooses this architecture to follow as the modules are not dependent and therefore, there is no chance for an error or confusion when developing the application.
Selecting any of the following depends upon the application you are building. As choosing the architecture wisely is important, so is the development approach. Only the combination of the right architecture and correct development approach leads your application to success. Therefore, bearing the criteria in mind, develop the application with the best intentions to achieve success.
