Volley vs Retrofit? Who is better at Both
Now-days almost every Android app uses a REST web API for data transfer. This makes me think what are the best practices to parse data and images from a REST web service. Earlier I used to prefer, writing my own code for parsing data. But now we have a whole range of REST client libraries, which can speed up the development, by reducing coding efforts and parsing data efficiently. Android Volley and Retrofit are two of the most used libraries for accessing REST web APIs today. For anyone choosing between them is a difficult task. In this article we will not only compare Android Volley vs Retrofit but will also discuss, out of these two, taking which one would be a better approach.
Research has proven that using an external library like Android Volley or Retrofit, definitely reduces the time taken to parse a response. Therefore if you are building up a new project, I would strongly recommend using either one of them to enhance your development. These libraries not only ease the development effort but also, give you many great features like retry mechanism, automatic parsing of data and caching. Although these libraries can increase the size of your apk a little, still they are worth it. Before starting the comparison let me first introduce these libraries:
Volley Library:
Volley is a networking library, developed by Google engineers. It was introduced in Google IO 2013, it offers great features like synchronous requests, asynchronous requests, prioritization, making multiple requests at the same time, ordered requests and of course caching. But one of the major problems faced by developers using this library is that it lacks detailed official documentation. Hence if you wish to learn more about it please refer to some of my tutorials:
Retrofit Library v1.9.0:
On the other hand, Retrofit is a clean, simple, and light library for Android by Square, Inc. In other words, Retrofit is a REST client for Android, through which you can make easy to use interfaces which can turn any Android app into a powerful one. What makes it different is that Retrofit can perform Async and sync requests with automatic JSON parsing without any effort. This feature alone makes it powerful enough to make a contender for this comparison. Although it has many more easy to use features, please refer to one of my tutorials to read more about them:
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