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

Version checking on Android


Android versions are shipped out very frequently. With every latest version of Android, you get new features and new improvements. Though Google tries very hard to provide backward compatibility, they aren't able to do so always. For example, there is no backward compatibility for Material design components; you need to be targeting API levels greater than 21 in order to use them. This requires the developer to check beforehand whether the component is supported on that API level or not to ensure that your app runs smoothly on all levels. We usually do that as follows:

if(Build.VERSION.SDK_INT>Build.VERSION_CODES.JELLY_BEAN){

}

Anko provides helper functions that help us achieve similar things but with easier syntax. In this recipe, we will see how to use it.

Getting ready

I'll be using Android Studio to write code. You also need to include the Anko library by adding these lines to your build.gradle file:

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

How to do...