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 covered how to create threads and coroutines in Kotlin, as well as the benefits of coroutines over threads.

Kotlin has simplified syntax for creating threads, compared to Java. But it still has the overhead of memory and, often, performance. Coroutines can solve these issues; use coroutines whenever you need to execute some code concurrently in Kotlin.

At this point, you should know how to start a coroutine and how to wait for it to complete, getting its results in the process. We also covered how coroutines are structured and learned about how they interact with dispatchers.

Finally, we touched upon the topic of structured concurrency, a modern idea that helps us prevent resource leaks in concurrent code easily.

In the next chapter, we'll discuss how we can use these concurrency primitives to create scalable and robust systems that suit our needs.