Flixster
A movie browsing application for Android that displays a list of movies currently playing in theaters using data from The Movie Database (TMDb) API. Users can view movie details and watch trailers.
Role
Android Developer
- Timeline
- September 2021
Technologies
- Java
- Android SDK
- Android Async HTTP
Tools
- Android Studio
- Git
- GitHub
- Glide
Background
A core skill for mobile developers is fetching data from a remote server, parsing the response, and displaying it in a user-friendly way. This project tackles the need for a practical exercise in working with REST APIs and presenting complex data in a mobile UI.
Solution
Flixster is an app that fetches a list of currently playing movies from The Movie Database API. It parses the JSON data and displays the movies in a scrollable list, showing their poster, title, and a brief overview. Tapping on a movie reveals a detailed view with more information and an embedded YouTube player for the trailer.
Process
- Set up the project and made an asynchronous GET request to The Movie Database API to retrieve movie data.
- Created a custom 'Movie' data model and parsed the incoming JSON response into a list of these objects.
- Built a RecyclerView to display the movie list and a detail screen with an embedded YouTube player for trailers.
Final Product
Impact
- Integrated a third-party REST API to fetch and display dynamic data from the web.
- Constructed a master-detail user interface, allowing users to browse a list and tap to view specific item details.
- Implemented an embedded video player using the YouTube Android Player API to play movie trailers.
Reflection
- Learned to handle asynchronous network requests to keep the application's UI responsive while fetching data.
- Practiced parsing complex JSON data and mapping it to custom Java objects for use within the app.
- Gained familiarity with using third-party libraries like Glide to efficiently load and cache images from a URL.