droidconIN 2015

Kotlin is a modern statically typed language that supports type inference, lambdas, traits, singletons, optional types for null safety and many more features that are far better than what Java offers. You will be able to appreciate Kotlin and how you can use Kotlin to build an Android application.

Outline

Kotlin is a language targeting the JVM built by JetBrains. Android Studio is built on IntelliJ IDEA which is also built by JetBrains. Kotlin is often compared to Swift and adds a lot of the features that Java misses. Kotlin runtime is quite small and the overhead is quite small and is completely worth the additional size.

This is a quick outline of the session.

• A quick overview of Kotlin syntax
• Basic types
• Packages
• Control flows
• Classes and Objects
  • Properties
  • Generics
  • Interfaces
  • Extending Classes
• Setup Kotlin with a Android project on Android Studio
• Building a simple app with Kotlin, RxJava, Retrofit and Realm

Speaker bio

After building web and backend apps for 13 years, I sucked up and started building native Android and iOS apps for the past year. After working with languages like Clojure, Javascript, Haskell, Ruby, Python and Swift, Java looked comically underpowered and proved to be a big pain to work with reactive libraries like RxJava. I then started building with retrolambda but finially gave up when I discovered Kotlin. This talk shares my experience around using Kotlin to build Android applications with an expressive yet performant language.