Kotlin Continues to Grow
Happy 2019! I hope your software development was memorable in 2018.
I’m starting out the new year with some Kotlin updates. Included are some software tidbits related to Kotlin’s continued growth.
If you are interested in learning about support from others about adoption of Kotlin for real world business solutions, checkout the post below from 2018.
Kotlin on the Radar
Another win in 2018 was that Kotlin was recognized and added to the ‘adopt’ category in the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar publication (May 2018). More details are included below.
Important Milestones
In 2018, some important milestones were reached for Kotlin:
- Gradle 5.0 includes Kotlin DSL v1.0 (provides type-safe build logic)
- Kotlin 1.3 Released (1.3.20 as of Jan 23, 2019)
- Ktor 1.0 Release (framework for building async servers and clients)
- Playground Updated (for trying out and learning Kotlin)
- Release of Coroutines (support for asynchronous programming)
- JetBrains and Google created a Kotlin Foundation
It’s refreshing to see this language evolving with the features, which in my opinion translates to higher quality business solutions.
Check out site below for more information on these milestones in 2018.
Playground (w/ Examples & Koans)
This is really important as the site allows for access to a Playground as well as Examples, and the all famous Koans.
In the Playground Page, the user can run, edit, and share Kotlin code. For those wanting to try out some new concepts or features, this is a low-overhead way to get started.
In the Examples Page, users learn through specific feature examples, with snippets of code that can be run/executed. The result can be checked to incrementally learn about various topics such as: Control Flow, the Standard Library, and Delegation.
In the Koans Page, users complete exercises that drill down into key concepts while solving failed unit tests. The goal is to make all the tests pass and while doing so, learn about Kotlin syntax and idioms. There is a plugin that can be used in IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio.
For more information about the Playground pages see below.
Future
In 2019, the outlook for Kotlin still looks great in my opinion. Many developers that have adopted Kotlin for day-to-day efforts describe the language as the best features of Scala, Java, and Groovy combined.
Looking back at 2018, Kotlin continued to grow and deliver some great new features. I’m hoping to explore and share those feature in more depth in 2019.
Stay tuned. Until next time …
