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

Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed the best practices in Kotlin, as well as some of the caveats of the language. Now, you should be able to write more idiomatic code that is also performant and maintainable.

You should make use of the scoping functions where necessary, but make sure not to overuse them as they may make the code confusing, especially for those newer to the language.

Be sure to handle nulls and type casts correctly, with let(), the Elvis operator, and the smart casts that the language provides. Finally, generics and sealed classes and interfaces are powerful tools that help describe complex relationships and behaviors between different classes.

In the next chapter, we'll put those skills to use by writing a real-life microservice Reactive design pattern.