Kotlin for Android

Kotlin was revealed in 2011 by JetBrains, Kotlin was written by the Russian Java developer company JetBrains. JetBrain is the organization behind platform like IntelliJ. JetBrains publicly released Kotlin in 2012 and adaptation 1.0 propelled a little more than a year prior. Google’s own particular Android Studio, it’s significant, depends on the JetBrains IntelliJ Java IDE. Google I/O 2017 has announced that Kotlin is now an official language in Android. Kotlin works on Java Framework, it completely works on JVM.

Kotlin is combination of some of the best features of other languages. Also, Kotlin is quite similar to Apple’s Swift. Google noticed that some have officially received the programming language for their generation applications, including Pinterest, and Square. Kotlin will be amicable to those who have already used the Java programming language and also can be a ease to the beginers on Android.
You can include as meager or as much Kotlin into your current codebase as you need, blending the two languages effortlessly inside a similar venture.

There are now numerous excited Kotlin engineers for Android and the organization says it is just tuning into what the group needs.The CEO of JetBrains says “Kotlin is easy to get started with and can be gradually introduced into existing projects, which means that your existing skills and technology investments are preserved.” Hence, developers are going to enjoy Kotlin’s clean abstractions, concise syntax, and type safety. (Thank You, Google!)

Advantages of Kotlin

Less amount of code, effort.
Reduces occurrence of bugs due to concise coding.
It can handle null pointer exceptions.
It includes existing libraries for JVM, Android and Browser
Its tool friendly

Why do we need Kotlin?

Kotlin can be preferred more due to following points :

Stuck on Java

No date time APIs Javax.time
No Streaming APIs
No language features Lamdas, method refs, non-capturing anon class
No try with resources

Java language restrictions and problems

Inability to add methods to platform types
Nullability problems
Mutability Problems
General verbiosity of common idioms

Android API design problems

Inheritance party
Nullability everywhere
Ceremony of APIs

How to convert Java to Kotlin?

Update your Android Studio to 3.0.
Select the java file from project structure that you need to convert to Kotlin.
Android Studio Menu -> Code -> Convert Java File to Kotlin File. (From Android Studio Menu select Code, you will then find a dropdown which has Convert Java File to Kotlin File option at bottom, click that and its done).

Syntax

fun sum(a : Int, b : Int) : Int {
return a+b
}

sum - method name
(a : Int, b : Int) - a,b variable name and Int its types
: Int after the method - is return type

We can get rid of these too much of syntax by just in lining the operation
fun sum(a : Int, b : Int) = a+b

Kotlin can be used to build applications on JVM, Android and browser. Kotlin is useful as it includes few lines of code as say if a file written in java takes 20 lines of code can be wrapped up to 5-6 lines in Kotlin. As the code is less the proabability of the occurence of bugs is less on the same time the effort, time is less and the productivity and performance gets better.

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Kotlin for Android