[m_fayer]

Looks really promising, thanks for the hint. It's on my to-evaluate list along with: http://robobinding.github.io/RoboBinding/

Also, if you're open to Xamarin, there's a great library there called MvvmCross that gives you in-AXML databinding and a general feel similar to Angular.

[zserge]

Thanks!

Unfortunately neither of the data binding libraries for Android worked for me, because they are either too hard to extend or too big/complex.

RoboBinding's idea is nice, but to me it's too implicit. It's really hard to tell what's happening behind the scenes.

As for the Xaramin - I would like to try it, but I run linux on my development machine, and it didn't start with Wine.

[m_fayer]

The "magic" nature of databinding seems unavoidable. Either it's driven by reflection and then it's more or less understandable but the performance suffers. Or, the bindings can be generated through some kind of bytecode weaving or code generation, which are both opaque to some degree. Either way it's hard to debug and possible to screw up performance, and I've yet to see an implementation without such tradeoffs. But in the end I think it's worth it for the architectural wins.