Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By : Miloš Vasić
Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By: Miloš Vasić

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a programming language intended to be a better Java, and it's designed to be usable and readable across large teams with different levels of knowledge. As a language, it helps developers build amazing Android applications in an easy and effective way. This book begins by giving you a strong grasp of Kotlin's features in the context of Android development and its APIs. Moving on, you'll take steps towards building stunning applications for Android. The book will show you how to set up the environment, and the difficulty level will grow steadily with the applications covered in the upcoming chapters. Later on, the book will introduce you to the Android Studio IDE, which plays an integral role in Android development. We'll use Kotlin's basic programming concepts such as functions, lambdas, properties, object-oriented code, safety aspects, type parameterization, testing, and concurrency, which will guide you through writing Kotlin code in production. We'll also show you how to integrate Kotlin into any existing Android project.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

What else is available?


Now, we will list some alternatives for Retrofit and Gson. Outside, there is a big open source community that makes great things every day. You are not obligated to use any libraries we present. You can choose any of the alternatives, or even create your own implementation!

Retrofit alternative

As its homepage says, Volley is an HTTP library that makes networking for Android apps easier and, most importantly, faster. Some of the key features Volley offers are as follows:

  • Automatic scheduling of network requests
  • Multiple concurrent network connections
  • Transparent disk and memory response caching with standard HTTP cache coherence
  • Support for request prioritization.
  • Cancellation request API
  • Ease of customization
  • Strong ordering
  • Debugging and tracing tools

Homepage--https://github.com/google/volley.

Gson alternative

Jackson is a low-level JSON parser. It's very similar to the Java StAX parser for XML. Some of the key features Jackson offers are as follows:

  • Very fast and convenient...