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)

Testing concurrent code

When it comes to tests, the important thing is not to just have them, but to have the correct ones. If we are thinking specifically about concurrency, there are two principles that I consider the foundations of correct testing. Let's turn our minds to a basic example, as a way to discuss those principles.

Consider a simple application that takes the identifier of a user and needs to retrieve, organize, and then return a defined set of information for that user. Now, some of that information will be readily available in the database of that application. Other information may need to come from a cache shared among instances of the application. And finally, some specific information will be retrieved from a different application, which exposes it through a REST API. Here is a simple image detailing the usual behavior for the functionality:

This diagram...