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 1: Getting Started with Kotlin

The bulk of this chapter will be dedicated to basic Kotlin syntax. It is important to be comfortable with a language before we start implementing any design patterns in it.

We'll also briefly discuss what problems design patterns solve and why you should use them in Kotlin. This will be helpful to those who are less familiar with the concept of design patterns. But even for experienced engineers, it may provide an interesting perspective.

This chapter doesn't aim to cover the entire language vocabulary but to get you familiar with some basic concepts and idioms. The following chapters will expose you to even more language features as they become relevant to the design patterns that we'll discuss.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • Basic language syntax and features
  • Understanding Kotlin code structure
  • Type system and null safety
  • Reviewing Kotlin data structures
  • Control flow
  • Working with text and loops
  • Classes and inheritance
  • Extension functions
  • Introduction to design patterns

By the end of this chapter, you'll have a knowledge of Kotlin's basics, which will be the foundation for the following chapters.