Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By : Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By: Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a modern and statically typed programming language with support for concurrency. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, Learning Concurrency in Kotlin addresses the unique challenges in design and implementation of concurrent code. This practical guide will help you to build distributed and scalable applications using Kotlin. Beginning with an introduction to Kotlin's coroutines, you’ll learn how to write concurrent code and understand the fundamental concepts needed to write multithreaded software in Kotlin. You'll explore how to communicate between and synchronize your threads and coroutines to write collaborative asynchronous applications. You'll also learn how to handle errors and exceptions, as well as how to work with a multicore processor to run several programs in parallel. In addition to this, you’ll delve into how coroutines work with each other. Finally, you’ll be able to build an Android application such as an RSS reader by putting your knowledge into practice. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned techniques and skills to write optimized code and multithread applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Creating an asynchronous function to hold the request... or not

Currently, a big part of our code to request and display the number of news is inside the onCreate() function. This is less than optimal, not only because it's mixed with the creation of the activity, but also because it prevents reusing this code. For example, if there were to be a refresh button, we would need to reuse all the code of the coroutine.

When considering the separation of this coroutine into its own function, there are many possible approaches. Here, we will cover the most common ones.

A synchronous function wrapped in an asynchronous caller

The first approach is quite simple. We can create a loadNews() function that directly invokes fetchRssHeadlines...