Book Image

Learn Kotlin Programming - Second Edition

By : Stephen Samuel, Stefan Bocutiu
Book Image

Learn Kotlin Programming - Second Edition

By: Stephen Samuel, Stefan Bocutiu

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a general-purpose programming language used for developing cross-platform applications. Complete with a comprehensive introduction and projects covering the full set of Kotlin programming features, this book will take you through the fundamentals of Kotlin and get you up to speed in no time. Learn Kotlin Programming covers the installation, tools, and how to write basic programs in Kotlin. You'll learn how to implement object-oriented programming in Kotlin and easily reuse your program or parts of it. The book explains DSL construction, serialization, null safety aspects, and type parameterization to help you build robust apps. You'll learn how to destructure expressions and write your own. You'll then get to grips with building scalable apps by exploring advanced topics such as testing, concurrency, microservices, coroutines, and Kotlin DSL builders. Furthermore, you'll be introduced to the kotlinx.serialization framework, which is used to persist objects in JSON, Protobuf, and other formats. By the end of this book, you'll be well versed with all the new features in Kotlin and will be able to build robust applications skillfully.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamental Concepts in Kotlin
5
Section 2: Practical Concepts in Kotlin
15
Section 3: Advanced Concepts in Kotlin

Destructed declarations

If you create an instance of BlogEntry, and then get the autocompletion dialog and navigate through the available methods, you will notice nine methods; these methods start with a series of components—component1(), component2(), and component9(). Each of these methods corresponds to each of the fields defined by type. Their return type will, therefore, match their respective field type. Here is the snippet for component6(), corresponding to the url field:

public final java.net.URI component6();
  Code:
    0: aload_0
    1: getfield      #51                 // Field url:Ljava/net/URI;
    4: areturn

The Scala developer reading this will most likely think of the product class and pattern matching. Kotlin is not as powerful when it comes to pattern matching, but it still gives you a flavor of it.

You might find it quite useful to break the object into...