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

Understanding Android broadcasts


Android applications can send or receive messages. Messages can be system-related events or custom ones defined by us. Interested parties are registered for certain messages by defining a proper intent filter and broadcast receiver. When a message is broadcast, all interested parties are notified. It is important to note that once you subscribe for broadcast messages (especially from the Activity class), you must unsubscribe at some point. When can we use broadcast messages? We use broadcast messages when we need a messaging system across our application. For example, imagine you started a long running process in the background. At some point, you want to notify multiple contexts about processing results. Broadcast messages are a perfect solution for this.

System broadcasts

System broadcasts are the ones that are sent by the Android system when various system events happen. Every message we send and finally receive is wrapped in the Intent class containing...