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

Reasoning behind the functional approach

Functional programming has been around for as long as other programming paradigms, for example, procedural and object-oriented programming. But in the past 15 years, it has gained significant momentum. The reason for this is that something else stalled: CPU speeds. We cannot speed up our CPUs as much as we did in the past, so we must parallelize our programs. And it turns out that the functional programming paradigm is exceptionally good at running parallel tasks.

The evolution of multicore processors is a fascinating topic in itself, but we'll cover it only briefly here. Workstations have had multiple processors since at least the 1980s to support the running of tasks from different users in parallel. Since workstations were massive during this era, they didn't need to worry about cramming everything into one chip. But when multiprocessors came to the consumer market around 2005, it became necessary to have one physical unit that...