Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By : Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By: Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a modern and statically typed programming language with support for concurrency. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, Learning Concurrency in Kotlin addresses the unique challenges in design and implementation of concurrent code. This practical guide will help you to build distributed and scalable applications using Kotlin. Beginning with an introduction to Kotlin's coroutines, you’ll learn how to write concurrent code and understand the fundamental concepts needed to write multithreaded software in Kotlin. You'll explore how to communicate between and synchronize your threads and coroutines to write collaborative asynchronous applications. You'll also learn how to handle errors and exceptions, as well as how to work with a multicore processor to run several programs in parallel. In addition to this, you’ll delve into how coroutines work with each other. Finally, you’ll be able to build an Android application such as an RSS reader by putting your knowledge into practice. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned techniques and skills to write optimized code and multithread applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Life Cycle and Error Handling

Now that we have an application using coroutines in order to do network requests, it's time to add new features to it while putting into practice new concepts and improving the user experience.

In this chapter, we will start by taking a closer look at two types of asynchronous tasks: Job and Deferred. We will talk about their similarities and their differences, taking a closer look at their life cycle. We will also cover how to calculate their current state and what to expect in each state. Then, we will improve our RSS reader by having it fetch news concurrently from many news outlets and using the newly introduced topics to handle exceptions when a feed can't be reached.

Some of the topics we will cover during this chapter are as listed:

  • Jobs and their use cases
  • Life cycle of Job and Deferred
  • Use cases for Deferred
  • What to expect with...