Book Image

Android Development with Kotlin

By : Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala
Book Image

Android Development with Kotlin

By: Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala

Overview of this book

Nowadays, improved application development does not just mean building better performing applications. It has become crucial to find improved ways of writing code. Kotlin is a language that helps developers build amazing Android applications easily and effectively. This book discusses Kotlin features in context of Android development. It demonstrates how common examples that are typical for Android development, can be simplified using Kotlin. It also shows all the benefits, improvements and new possibilities provided by this language. The book is divided in three modules that show the power of Kotlin and teach you how to use it properly. Each module present features in different levels of advancement. The first module covers Kotlin basics. This module will lay a firm foundation for the rest of the chapters so you are able to read and understand most of the Kotlin code. The next module dives deeper into the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions, classes, and function types. You will learn how Kotlin brings many improvements to the table by improving common Java concepts and decreasing code verbosity. The last module presents features that are not present in Java. You will learn how certain tasks can be achieved in simpler ways thanks to Kotlin. Through the book, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android development. You will get to know and understand most important Kotlin features, and how they can be used. You will be ready to start your own adventure with Android development with Kotlin.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
9
Making Your Marvel Gallery Application

Generics


Generics is a programming style where classes, functions, data structures, or algorithms are written in such a way that the exact type can be specified later. In general, generics provide type safety together with the ability to reuse a particular code structure for various data types.

Generics are present in both Java and Kotlin. They work in a similar way, but Kotlin offers a few improvements over the Java generic type system, such as use-site variance, start-projection syntax, and reified type parameters. We will discuss them in this chapter.

The need for generics

Programmers often need a way to specify that a collection only contains elements of a particular type, such as Int, Student, or Car. Without generics, we would need to separate classes for each data type (IntList, StudentList, CarList, and so on). Those classes would have a very similar internal implementation, which would only differ in the stored data type. This means that we would need to write the same code (such as...