Book Image

Kotlin Programming Cookbook

By : Aanand Shekhar Roy, Rashi Karanpuria
Book Image

Kotlin Programming Cookbook

By: Aanand Shekhar Roy, Rashi Karanpuria

Overview of this book

The Android team has announced first-class support for Kotlin 1.1. This acts as an added boost to the language and more and more developers are now looking at Kotlin for their application development. This recipe-based book will be your guide to learning the Kotlin programming language. The recipes in this book build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. After the fundamentals of the language, you will learn how to apply the object-oriented programming features of Kotlin 1.1. Programming with Lambdas will show you how to use the functional power of Kotlin. This book has recipes that will get you started with Android programming with Kotlin 1.1, providing quick solutions to common problems encountered during Android app development. You will also be taken through recipes that will teach you microservice and concurrent programming with Kotlin. Going forward, you will learn to test and secure your applications with Kotlin. Finally, this book supplies recipes that will help you migrate your Java code to Kotlin and will help ensure that it's interoperable with Java.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

How to use Anko to run background tasks with Kotlin in Android


Anko is a library created by the JetBrains team, which makes Android development quite easy with the help of many helper functions that abstract a lot of complexity and provides you easy-to-use methods. One such thing is to deal with background tasks. Using Anko, we can work with background tasks very easily. In this recipe, we will learn how to work with background tasks using Anko.

Getting ready

We will be using Android Studio 3.0 for coding purposes; ensure that you have its latest version. You need to add Anko to your build.gradle file, as shown:

implementation "org.jetbrains.anko:anko:$anko_version"

How to do it…

Doing a task in the background is very easy in Kotlin. Let's take a look at the next example. In this example, we will make a network request (which is required to do in the background or else you will get a NetworkOnMainThread exception); once the network request is complete, we will show the Success message using toast...