Book Image

Kotlin Quick Start Guide

By : Marko Devcic
Book Image

Kotlin Quick Start Guide

By: Marko Devcic

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a general purpose, object-oriented language that primarily targets the JVM and Android. Intended as a better alternative to Java, its main goals are high interoperability with Java and increased developer productivity. Kotlin is still a new language and this book will help you to learn the core Kotlin features and get you ready for developing applications with Kotlin. This book covers Kotlin features in detail and explains them with practical code examples.You will learn how to set up the environment and take your frst steps with Kotlin and its syntax. We will cover the basics of the language, including functions, variables, and basic data types. With the basics covered, the next chapters show how functions are first-class citizens in Kotlin and deal with the object-oriented side of Kotlin. You will move on to more advanced features of Kotlin. You will explore Kotlin's Standard Library and learn how to work with the Collections API. The book finishes by putting Kotlin in to practice, showing how to build a desktop app. By the end of this book, you will be confident enough to use Kotlin for your next project.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Interfaces


If you have any experience with any modern language, then you have probably used a type that defines a behavior. These types are called traits in Scala, protocols in Swift, and interfaces in Kotlin, Java, and C#.

An interface is a blueprint or a definition of a type. When a type implements an interface, we can then refer to it by this contract, that is, a set of methods that the type implements.

Here is an interface declaration in Kotlin:

interface Drivable {
fun drive()
}

The syntax for implementing an interface is the same as for inheritance. In the implementing class header, after a primary constructor or a class name comes the colon and the interface name:

class Car : Drivable {
override fun drive() {
println("Driving a car")
    }
}

The only difference from inheritance syntax is that we don't call the base type constructor because interfaces don't have one.

The implementing type (unless it is an abstract class) has to implement or override all the members that interface defined...