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

Project setup


First, we need to set up our IDE and our development project. To compile our Kotlin project, we'll use Gradle as our build tool.

App features

The main feature of our app will be a fast lookup of words. For this, we will store our definitions inside an SQLite database and use its full-text search feature.

For the most part, we'll be using types from the Java Standard library, except for the JDBC SQLite database driver (https://github.com/xerial/sqlite-jdbc) and the Jackson JSON deserializing library (https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson).

Since we want to provide a fast lookup of words, the UI can be kept simple. We'll have a search area where a user can enter a word they want to look up, and below that, we'll display the results inside a ListView

Requirements

To write this app, there aren't many requirements. Except for Kotlin and Java, you should also have Gradle installed. You can use any IDE you wish, but again IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is recommended, as it works great...