Zillow is a top online real estate marketplace that provides consumers with the listings, data, and calculators they need to help them buy, rent, or sell a home. The site also connects users with local agents, mortgage providers, and home designers.
Launched in 2006 and headquartered in Seattle, Zillow maintains a database of more than 110 million U.S. homes. They also operate a popular suite of over two dozen mobile real estate apps. When they began a major overhaul of their code in their Android mobile app in July 2017, Zillow wanted to simplify their developers’ lives by making the code more readable and easier for new team members to understand.
What they did
Zillow revamped their code using Android Architecture Components. "We were investigating different kinds of architecture," says Aayush Raj, Zillow software engineer. "Architecture Components had the added advantage of lifecycle awareness, which made code much easier to manage."
ViewModel allows data to survive configuration changes (such as screen rotations), while LiveData is an observable data-holder class. Both were used by Zillow, and together, they provided a powerful template for implementing Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). "It helped make our code more testable," Raj says. The Room persistency library also made it easy to build a local cache layer, so the app didn't have to pull data from the network as often, "improving performance and the user experience."
Results
Moving lots of code for data updates from activities to ViewModels has "definitely helped" make the whole code base more readable, Raj adds. They haven't yet converted the whole app to ViewModel, but components that are using ViewModel haven't had any lifecycle-related bugs. Communicating data updates to activities and fragments also works very well.
"Developers are absolutely more productive using Android Architecture Components," says Sumiran Pradhan, Zillow senior software development engineer. Architecture Components gives them guidance when starting from scratch, but is also useful in the existing code base. "Once new developers understand where the logic lives in the ViewModel, they love it," Pradhan adds.
Get started
Android Architecture Components is open to all developers as part of Android Jetpack. Get started with Android Architecture Components.