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

Introduction to Retrofit


As we already mentioned, Retrofit is an open source library. It is the most popular HTTP client for Android used today. Because of that, we will introduce you to Retrofit basics and demonstrate how to use it. The version we will cover is 2.3.0. We will give you step-by-step guidance on how to use it.

First of all, Retrofit depends on some libraries too. We will use it with Okhttp. Okhttp is an HTTP/HTTP2 client developed by the same guys who developed Retrofit. Before we start, we will put dependencies into our build.gradle configuration as follows:

    apply plugin: "com.android.application" 
    apply plugin: "kotlin-android" 
    apply plugin: "kotlin-android-extensions" 
    ... 
    dependencies { 
      ... 
      compile 'com.squareup.retrofit2:retrofit:2.3.0' 
      compile 'com.squareup.retrofit2:converter-gson:2.0.2' 
      compile 'com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:3.9.0' 
      compile 'com.squareup.okhttp3:logging-interceptor:3.9.0' 
   } 

We updated our Retrofit...