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

Strategy

The goal of the Strategy design pattern is to allow an object to alter its behavior at runtime.

Let's recall the platformer game we were designing in Chapter 3, Understanding Structural Patterns, while discussing the Facade design pattern.

Canary Michael, who acts as a game designer in our small indie game development company, came up with a great idea. What if we were to give our hero an arsenal of weapons to protect us from those horrible carnivorous snails?

Weapons all shoot projectiles (you don't want to get too close to those dangerous snails) in the direction our hero is facing:

enum class Direction { 
    LEFT, RIGHT 
}

All projectiles should have a pair of coordinates (our game is 2D, remember?) and a direction:

data class Projectile(private var x: Int, 
                      private var y: Int, 
  ...