Learn Kotlin Programming Language
This tutorial provides in brief explanation of kotlin programming language for both beginners and professional developers. These are the contents that we have explained in this article.
1. Kotlin Programming Language
1.1 Kotlin Introduction
1.2 History of Kotlin
1.4 Features of Kotlin
1.5 Kotlin Supporting Platforms
1.6 Corporate users of Kotlin
1.7 Kotlin Server Side Development Frameworks
Kotlin Introduction
Kotlin is a general-purpose, open-source programming language. It can be used to develop android apps, server-side apps and much more. It is a high level strongly, statically typed language and its code is more concise, readable and easy to understand. Its popularity has grown day by day.
The kotlin code runs on the JVM and its syntax is much like Java, it first compiles the code into byte code and then runs on the JVM as similar to the Java language. We can use any Java IDE for kotlin development.
In 2017, android team announced Kotlin as an official language for Android app development. After this announcement a large number of android users began adopting it.
History of Kotlin
Kotlin was developed by JetBrains team. This project development started in 2010 and officially, first released in February 2016. This language was developed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Features of Kotlin
These are the reasons why we should use kotlin.
- Kotlin is open source, statically typed programming language.
- Kotlin is a functional language. There is no need to write lots of code.
- As it is concise language, it is very easy to read and understand the code pattern.
- In a very short period of time, it can give better performance.
- It is interoperable and null safety language, it eliminates the risk of NullPointerException.
- It provides the ability to target JavaScript, as it transpiles to JavaScript.
- Kotlin is compatible with all the Java based framework.
- For the Java developers, it is very easy to start with Kotlin.
- We can easily migrate the old Java codebase to Kotlin. There is automated Java to Kotlin converter included in Kotlin plugin.
- It supports scalability to expand the application for a massive number of users.
- Kotlin applications can be deployed in any host that support Java web applications, like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform etc.
Kotlin Supporting Platforms
- Android
- Windows
- Linux
- iOS
- MacOS
- WebAssembly
Corporate users of Kotlin
Pinterest, Gradle, Coursera, Netflix, Uber, Corda, Pivotal.
Kotlin Server Side Development Frameworks
- Spring
- Vertx
- Ktor
- Javalin
- Spark