Book Image

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Alexey Soshin
Book Image

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Alexey Soshin

Overview of this book

This book shows you how easy it can be to implement traditional design patterns in the modern multi-paradigm Kotlin programming language, and takes you through the new patterns and paradigms that have emerged. This second edition is updated to cover the changes introduced from Kotlin 1.2 up to 1.5 and focuses more on the idiomatic usage of coroutines, which have become a stable language feature. You'll begin by learning about the practical aspects of smarter coding in Kotlin, as well as understanding basic Kotlin syntax and the impact of design patterns on your code. The book also provides an in-depth explanation of the classical design patterns, such as Creational, Structural, and Behavioral families, before moving on to functional programming. You'll go through reactive and concurrent patterns, and finally, get to grips with coroutines and structured concurrency to write performant, extensible, and maintainable code. By the end of this Kotlin book, you'll have explored the latest trends in architecture and design patterns for microservices. You’ll also understand the tradeoffs when choosing between different architectures and make informed decisions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Classical Patterns
6
Section 2: Reactive and Concurrent Patterns
11
Section 3: Practical Application of Design Patterns

Chapter 9: Idioms and Anti-Patterns

In the previous chapters, we discussed the different aspects of the Kotlin programming language, the benefits of functional programming, and concurrent design patterns.

This chapter discusses the best and worst practices in Kotlin. You'll learn what idiomatic Kotlin code should look like and which patterns to avoid. This chapter contains a collection of best practices spanning those different topics.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using the scope functions
  • Type checks and casts
  • An alternative to the try-with-resources statement
  • Inline functions
  • Implementing algebraic data types
  • Reified generics
  • Using constants efficiently
  • Constructor overload
  • Dealing with nulls
  • Making asynchronicity explicit
  • Validating input
  • Preferring sealed classes over enums

After completing this chapter, you should be able to write more readable and maintainable Kotlin code, as well as...