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

Introduction to Android concurrency


A default execution for our application is performed on the main application thread. This execution must be performant! If it happens that something is performing too long, then we get ANR--an Android application not responding message. To avoid ANRs, we run our code in the background. Android provides mechanisms so we can do that efficiently. Running operations asynchronously gives not just good performance, but great user experience.

Main thread

All user interface updates are performed from one thread. This is the main thread. All events are collected in a queue and processed by the Looper class instance.

The following image explains the relationship between classes involved:

It is important to note that the main thread updates are all the UI you see. However, it can be done from other threads as well. Doing this directly from some other thread will cause an exception and your application can crash. To avoid this, execute all thread-related code on the main...