Introduction to Kotlin

Introduction to Kotlin

1.1. What is Kotlin?

• Developed by JetBrains in 2010 ; First launched and open sourced in July 2011 ; On February 15, 2016 , the first official stable version of Kotlin v1.0 was released; On May 18, 2017 , at the Google I/O conference, Google announced Kotlin as the official official language for Android development.

• Based on a statically typed programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it can be compiled into Java bytecode or JavaScript, which is convenient to run on devices without a JVM.

• Springboot2.0 first development language

1.2. Why use Kotlin?

• Concise : Greatly reduces the amount of boilerplate code.
• Null-safe : Avoid class-wide bugs like null pointer exceptions.
• Interoperability : Leverage existing libraries for the JVM, Android, and browsers.
• Tool friendly : Can be built with any Java IDE or using the command line.
• Functional : Kotlin is an object-oriented language that uses very popular functional programming concepts like lambda expressions to easily solve problems. One of the great features is the way Collections are handled
• Extension functions : we can extend more features of the class without even having access to this class
• Coroutine (thread)
• DSL

1.3. References

• Official Kotlin Documentation
• Kotlin Chinese Documentation
• Kotlin Official Blog
• Kotlin source code

1.4. Development tools

• Intellij Idea (recommended)
• Android Studio (requires Kotlin plugin installed)
• Eclipse