Book Image

Android Development with Kotlin

By : Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala
Book Image

Android Development with Kotlin

By: Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala

Overview of this book

Nowadays, improved application development does not just mean building better performing applications. It has become crucial to find improved ways of writing code. Kotlin is a language that helps developers build amazing Android applications easily and effectively. This book discusses Kotlin features in context of Android development. It demonstrates how common examples that are typical for Android development, can be simplified using Kotlin. It also shows all the benefits, improvements and new possibilities provided by this language. The book is divided in three modules that show the power of Kotlin and teach you how to use it properly. Each module present features in different levels of advancement. The first module covers Kotlin basics. This module will lay a firm foundation for the rest of the chapters so you are able to read and understand most of the Kotlin code. The next module dives deeper into the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions, classes, and function types. You will learn how Kotlin brings many improvements to the table by improving common Java concepts and decreasing code verbosity. The last module presents features that are not present in Java. You will learn how certain tasks can be achieved in simpler ways thanks to Kotlin. Through the book, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android development. You will get to know and understand most important Kotlin features, and how they can be used. You will be ready to start your own adventure with Android development with Kotlin.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
9
Making Your Marvel Gallery Application

Java SAM support in Kotlin


It is really easy to use higher-order functions in Kotlin. The problem is that we often need to interoperate with Java, which natively doesn't support it. It achieves substitution by using interfaces with only one method. This kind of interface is called a Single Abstract Method (SAM) or functional interface. The best example, of situation in which we need to set up a function this way is when we use setOnClickListener on a View element. In Java (until 8), there was no simpler way than by using an anonymous inner class:

    //Java 
    button.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() { 
        @Override public void onClick(View v) { 
            // Operation 
        } 
    }); 

In the preceding example, the OnClickListener method is the SAM, because it contains only a single method, onClick. While SAMs are very often used as a replacement for function definitions, Kotlin also generates a constructor for them that contains the function type as a parameter. It is...