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

The it notation

It is very common in functional programming to keep your functions small and simple. The simpler the function, the easier it is to understand, and the more chances it has to be reused in other places. And the aim of reusing code is one of the basic Kotlin principles.

Notice that in the preceding example, we didn't specify the type of the d variable. We could do this using the same colon notation we have used elsewhere:

dwarfs.forEach { d: String ->  
    println(d) 
}

However, usually, we don't need to do this because the compiler can figure this out from the generic types that we use. After all, dwarfs is of the List<String> type, so d is of the String type as well.

The type of the argument is not the only part that we can omit when writing short lambdas like this one. If a lambda takes a single argument, we can use the implicit name for it, which in this case, is it:

dwarfs.forEach {
   ...