Facebook has expanded its developer tool lineup by launching open source framework Litho. The new development is designed to let developers build smooth UIs on Android.
Litho uses a declarative API to provide you with defined UI components. There is a declarative model that comes from Facebook’s React UI library, and the framework also leverages Yoga to build the layout and reduce the number of ViewGroups. Further, Facebook has provided some built-in text optimisations to reduce memory consumption and improve scroll performance by 35 percent.
“Litho is designed to be faster and more efficient when working with scrolling surfaces. It aims to improve performance by moving the heavy work to a background thread and spreading the rendering work across multiple frames,” said Facebook’s software engineers Pasquale Anatriello and Marco Cova.
Already exists on Facebook apps
Facebook has deployed Litho internally, across its Android app suite to improve the experience. While users are yet to respond to the change, the company believes that by breaking down complex views in components such as text, images and videos.
The framework also uses RecyclerView UI container on Android to recycle objects like text and image and reuse them anywhere within the interface. This also helps to save memory and enhance performance on a variety of hardware.
With Gradle and Buck integration
You can access the Litho code directly from a GitHub repository. Moreover, the framework can integrate into your Gradle or Buck projects.
