At it’s I/O 2017 developers conference yesterday, Google announced official support for the Kotlin programming language for android development. Kotlin can be used to develop android applications along with Java and C++. According to google, Kotlin is a brilliantly designed, mature language and it will make Android development faster and more fun.
Exciting news, developers. @Kotlin is officially joining the #Android family. #io17 pic.twitter.com/Q4CLlWfC3B
— Android (@Android) May 17, 2017
What is Kotlin Programming Language?
Kotlin is an open source programming language. It is developed by JetBrains, the same people who created IntelliJ. Google also shared it is partnering with JetBrains to move Kotlin into a nonprofit foundation. 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. Kotlin is very good for dealing with runtime exceptions and source code verbosity.
Kotlin is very similar to Java and C++. it’s object oriented and statically typed, and designed for similar problems Java solves. But because it’s a clean slate in many ways, Kotlin adds a lot of nice-to-have features, a much cleaner syntax, ideas from functional programming, and other enhancements over Java.
The best thing is that Google does not own Kotlin so it will remain open source and platform-independent. It is not like Apple’s swift programming language. Kotlin language is designed to run as native code on iOS and Macs, and also compiles to JavaScript for web development.
For more information on getting started with the programming language, check out the Koans tutorial.
How to use Kotlin in Android Studio?
Android Studio is built upon IntelliJ IDEA, an IDE built by JetBrains—the same company that created the Kotlin language. The JetBrains team has been working for years to make sure Kotlin works great with IntelliJ IDEA. The next version Android Studio 3.0 will be auto integrated with Kotlin so Android developers will no longer need to install any extras or worry about compatibility.For older version of android studio, you’ll require kotlin plugin.
Meanwhile, you can Get started with Kotlin. You can add as little or as much Kotlin into your existing codebase as you want, mixing the two languages freely within the same project. Calling out to Kotlin code from Java code should just work while calling to Java code requires some automatically applied translation conventions.
