Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By : Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin

By: Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a modern and statically typed programming language with support for concurrency. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, Learning Concurrency in Kotlin addresses the unique challenges in design and implementation of concurrent code. This practical guide will help you to build distributed and scalable applications using Kotlin. Beginning with an introduction to Kotlin's coroutines, you’ll learn how to write concurrent code and understand the fundamental concepts needed to write multithreaded software in Kotlin. You'll explore how to communicate between and synchronize your threads and coroutines to write collaborative asynchronous applications. You'll also learn how to handle errors and exceptions, as well as how to work with a multicore processor to run several programs in parallel. In addition to this, you’ll delve into how coroutines work with each other. Finally, you’ll be able to build an Android application such as an RSS reader by putting your knowledge into practice. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned techniques and skills to write optimized code and multithread applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Using a UI dispatcher

In the same way that we used a CoroutineDispatcher to run a thread in the background, we can now use one to preform operations in the main thread.

Platform-specific UI libraries

Given that there are many types of GUI applications for the JVM, Kotlin has separated some platform-specific coroutine functionality into libraries.

  • kotlinx-coroutines-android
  • kotlinx-coroutines-javafx
  • kotlinx-coroutines-swing

Notice that all these platforms have the same UI model that we talked about before, in which only the UI thread can create and update the views. So, these tiny libraries are simply a CoroutineDispatcher that is implemented to confine coroutines to the UI thread.

The Android library also adds support for...