Book Image

Kotlin Programming By Example

By : Iyanu Adelekan
Book Image

Kotlin Programming By Example

By: Iyanu Adelekan

Overview of this book

Kotlin greatly reduces the verbosity of source code. With Google having announced their support for Kotlin as a first-class language for writing Android apps, now's the time learn how to create apps from scratch with Kotlin Kotlin Programming By Example takes you through the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions and classes. You’ll explore various features of Kotlin by building three applications of varying complexity. For a quick start to Android development, we look at building a classic game, Tetris, and elaborate on object-oriented programming in Kotlin. Our next application will be a messenger app, a level up in terms of complexity. Before moving onto the third app, we take a look at data persistent methods, helping us learn about the storage and retrieval of useful applications. Our final app is a place reviewer: a web application that will make use of the Google Maps API and Place Picker. By the end of this book, you will have gained experience of of creating and deploying Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating the Chat UI

The chat UI we are about to create must display the message thread of an active conversation as well as enable a user to send a new message to the individual they are chatting with. We will start this section by creating the view layout that will be rendered to the user.

Creating the chat layout

We will make use of an open source library called ChatKit to create the chat view's layout. ChatKit is an Android library that provides flexible components for chat user interface implementation in Android projects as well as utilities for chat-user-interface data management and customization.

We added ChatKit to the Messenger project with the following line of code in the build.gradle script:

implementation...