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

Different ways of calling a function


Sometimes we need to call a function and provide only selected arguments. In Java, we could create multiple overloads of the same method, but this solution has some limitations. The first problem is that the number of possible permutations of a given method is growing very quickly (2n), making them very difficult to maintain. The second problem is that overloads must be distinguishable from each other, so the compiler may know which overload to call. So when a method defines a few parameters with the same type, we can't define all possible overloads. That's why in Java we often need to pass multiple null values to a method:

    // Java 
    printValue("abc", null, null, "!"); 

Multiple null parameters provide boilerplate. Such a situation greatly decreases method readability. In Kotlin, there is no such problem, because Kotlin has a feature called default arguments and named argument syntax.

Default argument values

Default arguments are mostly known from...