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

Star-projections


Because of type erasure, incomplete type information is available at runtime. For example, type parameters of generic types are not available:

    val list = listOf(1,2,3)
    println(list.javaClass) // Prints: class java.util.Arrays$ArrayList

This leads to a few problems. We can't perform any checks to verify what types of element List contains:

    /*
    Compile time error: cannot check instance of erased type: 
    List<String>
    */
    if(collection is List<Int>) {
        //...
    }

The problem occurs because a check is performed at runtime where information about type parameters is not available. Kotlin, however, as opposed to Java, does not allow us to declare a raw type (a generic type that is not parametrized with a type argument):

    SimpleList<> // Java: ok
    SimpleList<> // Kotlin: error

Kotlin allows us to use star-projection syntax instead, which is basically a way to say that information about the type argument is missing or it is...