Migrating from string resources to SPI

[zTrap]

What do you think about migrating to Java Service Provider Interface?

[mikepenz]

If we can make it work for android without any major overhead I would say absolutely.
One thing which is very relevant all the time though... obfuscation :D

[zTrap]

We can make this, but we need to switch to jar packaging for typeface libraries. And obfuscation work perfectly with SPI :)

[mikepenz]

Why would we need the jar packaging? the aar packaging is like a jar with additional features.
Maybe I miss something important here?

[zTrap]

Aar removes META-INF folder from package, but SPI requires it

[mikepenz]

hmmmm then there may be a different issue, as this may get lost in the end again via proguard. many people have a packaging rule to exclude meta inf files. due to conflicts of other libs.. :/

[zTrap]

Hmm, ok, I’ll investigate this

[zTrap]

My bad, it works perfectly with aar and auto-service (which adds all required information in META-INF automatically)

[mikepenz]

Hmm I would propose that we have a look on how this meta data has to look like and we add it manually then to not rely on external dependencies.
but that sounds like it could work

[zTrap]

I'we tried to add META-INF manually in res folder, but it wont work. Maybe I did something wrong... But I don't think this dependency is redundant. It's can be used in kapt configuration for processor and compileOnly for annotation, so nothing redundant is added to libraries

[mikepenz]

but it will have to be mentioned in the licenses. and as it is a compile time dependency only, there is no reference left in the dependency tree, so AboutLibraries won't see it :D

Oh the META-INF won't be in the res folder. as it is "special" compile time.

I think we may be able to write to it via gradle :)

[zTrap]

Sounds good :)

[mikepenz]

Theoretically we could just use the ContentProvider of android to auto register the font dependencies...
https://medium.com/@andretietz/auto-initialize-your-android-library-2349daf06920

I am not really sure about the real world performance impact of having many contentProviders in an app :/

so let's say there are 5 fonts in an app. what would be the impact?

[zTrap]

Idk, we need to test it

[mikepenz]

Well google just made this one a lot easier :D https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/app-startup

[zTrap]

Look's so pretty and easy. We'll wait for stable version?

[mikepenz]

I'd say we prepare a beta release of Android-Iconics v6 :D and wait for it's release until the app startup library is at least in beta :)

I'm gonna spend a bit of time on this, this week to prepare things :)