Lazy image loading

Sometimes, you don’t necessarily want an image to load at the exact moment that it’s rendered; for example, you might be rendering something that’s not visible on the screen yet. Most of the time, it’s perfectly fine to fetch the image source from the network before it’s actually visible. But if you’re fine-tuning your application and discover that loading lots of images over the network causes performance issues, you can use the lazy loading strategy.

I think the more common use case in a mobile context is handling a scenario where you’ve rendered one or more images where they’re visible, but the network is slow to respond. In this case, you will probably want to render a placeholder image so that the user sees something right away, rather than an empty space. So, let’s get started.

Firstly, you can implement an abstraction that wraps the actual image that you want to show once it’s loaded...