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

Dealing with nulls

Nulls are unavoidable, especially if you work with Java libraries or get data from a database. We've already discussed that there are different ways to check whether a variable contains null in Kotlin; for example:

// Will return "String" half of the time and null the other 
// half 
val stringOrNull: String? = if (Random.nextBoolean()) 
  "String" else null  
 
// Java-way check 
if (stringOrNull != null) { 
    println(stringOrNull.length) 
}

We could rewrite this code using the Elvis operator (?:):

val alwaysLength = stringOrNull?.length ?: 0 

If the length is not null, this operator will return its value. Otherwise, it will return the default value we supplied, which is 0 in this case.

If you have a nested object, you can chain those checks. For example, let's have a Response object that contains a Profile, which, in turn, contains the first name and last name fields, which...