Book Image

Android Development with Kotlin

By : Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala
Book Image

Android Development with Kotlin

By: Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala

Overview of this book

Nowadays, improved application development does not just mean building better performing applications. It has become crucial to find improved ways of writing code. Kotlin is a language that helps developers build amazing Android applications easily and effectively. This book discusses Kotlin features in context of Android development. It demonstrates how common examples that are typical for Android development, can be simplified using Kotlin. It also shows all the benefits, improvements and new possibilities provided by this language. The book is divided in three modules that show the power of Kotlin and teach you how to use it properly. Each module present features in different levels of advancement. The first module covers Kotlin basics. This module will lay a firm foundation for the rest of the chapters so you are able to read and understand most of the Kotlin code. The next module dives deeper into the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions, classes, and function types. You will learn how Kotlin brings many improvements to the table by improving common Java concepts and decreasing code verbosity. The last module presents features that are not present in Java. You will learn how certain tasks can be achieved in simpler ways thanks to Kotlin. Through the book, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android development. You will get to know and understand most important Kotlin features, and how they can be used. You will be ready to start your own adventure with Android development with Kotlin.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
9
Making Your Marvel Gallery Application

Casts


The casting concept is supported by many programming languages. Basically, casting is a way to convert an object of one particular type into another type. In Java, we need to cast an object explicitly before accessing its member, or cast it and store it in the variable of the casted type. Kotlin simplifies concept of casting and moves it to the next level by introducing smart casts.

In Kotlin, we can perform a few types of cast:

  • Cast objects to different types explicitly (safe cast operator)
  • Cast objects to different types, or nullable types to non-nullable types, implicitly (smart cast mechanism)

Safe/unsafe cast operator

In strongly typed languages, such as Java or Kotlin, we need to convert values from one type to another explicitly using the cast operator. A typical casting operation is taking an object of one particular type and turning it into another object type that is its supertype (upcasting), subtype (downcasting), or interface. Let's start with a small reminder of casting that...