Creating a UI Toolkit From Scratch
summary
A small UI toolkit called apex toolkit is built from scratch for Android and runs on a demo that draws an image and two buttons and responds to clicks. Architecture uses an entity-component model so widgets are elements plus composable behaviors. Rendering renders every frame via Choreographer to an Android canvas through a partial Android renderer, which works but cheats on invalidation and allocates more than production needs. Source lives at /homegive/experiment/apex and making a production-grade toolkit takes years not months (15 years of platform work cited).
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:50UI Toolkits
- 8:49Live Coding
- 10:17Entity Component Framework
- 20:29UI Toolkit
- 21:42Apex
- 22:45Abstraction Layers
- 23:41Render API
- 24:29Canvas
- 25:07Drawing surfaces
- 26:05Activity
- 28:11Rendering Loop
- 29:28Back to Implementation
- 29:56Renderer
- 30:24Exercises
- 30:44Widgets
- 31:05Invalidation
- 32:28Minimize Allocation
- 33:14Crossplatform abstraction
- 33:53Key takeaway
- 34:11Questions
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