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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Kotlin Developer Starter in Android projects


During our STX Next's Lightning Talks I'd given a presentation about Kotlin. It's a quick starter about the language. The idea was to create a short talk that would fit in a timeframe of 45m-1h. I assumed that attendees had basic skills from Android development, functional programming, java JDK and some JVM languages like - scala, closure or groovy.



Slideshare presentation:
https://t.co/oVPJw1YIGa


Presentation summary:
Kotlin - one of the popular programming languages built on top of Java that runs on JVM. Thanks to JetBrains support and excellent IDE integration, it’s an ideal choice for Android development. 100% Java compatibility, interoperability and no runtime overhead is just the beginning of a long list of strengths. Kotlin is supposed to be a subset of SCALA, on one hand covering major advantages for developers and keeping short compile times on the other.

This presentation is a Developer Starter - a set of hand-picked information allowing a person with no knowledge of Kotlin to start writing basic Android activities and set up a kotlin-based Android project. It starts with language background, reasons for its creation and advantages. Then presents basic use cases, syntax, structures and patterns. Later on Kotlin is presented in Android context. Simple project structure, imports and Kotlin usage with Android SDK is explained. In the end cost of Kotlin compilation is presented and the language is compared to SCALA and SWIFT.