New article: Litho: Facebook’s new open source declarative framework for Android read more at here http://www.spinonews.com/index.php/android/item/3327-litho-facebook-s-new-open-source-declarative-framework-for-android

Facebook introduced a new open-source declarative framework called Litho for building efficient user interfaces on Android. Currently, Facebook uses the same framework internally to build its own Android app. 

At its F8 developer conference, Facebook said, this new framework brought up last October when the company was trying to figure out how to build a more performant framework for displaying the Facebook News Feed, which tends to be more complex than the scrollable lists for which the standard Android tools are optimized.

Facebook’s Pasquale Anatriello and Marco Cova, said, as UIs become increasingly sophisticated, it gets harder to complete all the rendering work that needs to get done in this frame. This proves to be especially challenging with dynamic scrolling surfaces, as new pieces of UI are constantly being introduced on screen.

Litho programmers built a new system that improves scroll performance by 35% by breaking down complex views into smaller components such as text, images, and videos. In this way, the render can happen incremental, speeding up the process.

 

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The Facebook engineers said, Litho was built for Facebook to fix Facebook problems, many other apps out there focus on the idea of a feed. Even if developers won't use Litho as such, the fact that it is open-source means they can find something to suit their needs in there which they can adapt in order to fix other issues they may encounter.

 

Now, Litho is available on GitHub and it also has a homepage to help everyone better understand the project. Facebook also took it upon itself to make a number of tutorials and technical instructions for those who are planning to play around in Litho.