Book Image

Hands-On Object-Oriented Programming with Kotlin

By : Abid Khan, Igor Kucherenko
Book Image

Hands-On Object-Oriented Programming with Kotlin

By: Abid Khan, Igor Kucherenko

Overview of this book

Kotlin is an object-oriented programming language. The book is based on the latest version of Kotlin. The book provides you with a thorough understanding of programming concepts, object-oriented programming techniques, and design patterns. It includes numerous examples, explanation of concepts and keynotes. Where possible, examples and programming exercises are included. The main purpose of the book is to provide a comprehensive coverage of Kotlin features such as classes, data classes, and inheritance. It also provides a good understanding of design pattern and how Kotlin syntax works with object-oriented techniques. You will also gain familiarity with syntax in this book by writing labeled for loop and when as an expression. An introduction to the advanced concepts such as sealed classes and package level functions and coroutines is provided and we will also learn how these concepts can make the software development easy. Supported libraries for serialization, regular expression and testing are also covered in this book. By the end of the book, you would have learnt building robust and maintainable software with object oriented design patterns in Kotlin.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Delegate properties

Delegation refers to a situation in which we pass responsibility to someone else. In Kotlin, properties can either be accessed directly, or by using the get and set functions with the backing field. When properties are not backed by their own class but the responsibility is given to another class instead, these properties are called delegate properties. This might look strange at first, but when the class properties are more complex than simply storing values in fields, this feature becomes very convenient. First, let's have a look at how to delegate properties to the helper class. We'll start with a Person class with two properties, name and age:

class Person() {
val name : String by DelegatePersonName()
var age : Int by DelegatePersonAge()
}

There are two things to notice in the Person class: the by keyword and the class name after the by...