Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By : Miloš Vasić
Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By: Miloš Vasić

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a programming language intended to be a better Java, and it's designed to be usable and readable across large teams with different levels of knowledge. As a language, it helps developers build amazing Android applications in an easy and effective way. This book begins by giving you a strong grasp of Kotlin's features in the context of Android development and its APIs. Moving on, you'll take steps towards building stunning applications for Android. The book will show you how to set up the environment, and the difficulty level will grow steadily with the applications covered in the upcoming chapters. Later on, the book will introduce you to the Android Studio IDE, which plays an integral role in Android development. We'll use Kotlin's basic programming concepts such as functions, lambdas, properties, object-oriented code, safety aspects, type parameterization, testing, and concurrency, which will guide you through writing Kotlin code in production. We'll also show you how to integrate Kotlin into any existing Android project.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 12. Backend and API

In this chapter, we will connect our application to the remote backend instance. All data we create will be synchronized to and from the backend. For the API calls, we will use Retrofit. Retrofit is the most frequently used HTTP client for the Android platform. We will guide you step by step through the common practices so you can easily connect and implement connection to backend in any application you develop in the future.

This chapter is, by far, the longest chapter in this book, and here, we will cover many important things such as the following topics:

  • Working with data classes
  • Retrofit
  • Gson with Kotson library
  • Content providers
  • Content loaders
  • Android adapters
  • Data binding
  • Using lists and grids

Read this chapter carefully and enjoy playing with your application.