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

Android layouts


We will continue our work by defining layouts for each screen. Layouts in Android are defined in XML. We will mention the most commonly used layout types and populate them with commonly used layout components.

Each layout file has one of the layout types as its top-level container. Layouts can contain other layouts with UI components and so on. We can nest it. Let's mention the most commonly used layout types:

  • Linear layout: This aligns UI components in a linear order, vertically or horizontally
  • Relative layout: These UI components are aligned relatively to each other
  • List view layout: All items are organized in the form of a list
  • Grid view layout: All items are organized in the form of a grid
  • Scroll view layout: This is used to enable scrolling when its content becomes higher than the actual height of the screen

Layout elements that we just mentioned are view groups. Each view group contains other views. View groups extend the ViewGroup class. At the top, everything is a View...