Kotlin, RxJava, and Android is Fun Times 3

It’s almost springtime and time to explore new domains! So even though I still love RxSwift and Swift, I’m looking into Kotlin, RxJava, and how it relates to Android.

Kotlin

Kotlin makes a great first impression! Kotlin has a feel similar to Swift. The functions are denoted with fun. Also, the syntax seems lean.

Some examples are available to try online at http://try.kotlinlang.org After that, a deeper dive into the Kotlin Reference seems like a good idea.

Fun So Far .. Yet Time For an IDE

As described in the Kotlin: Getting Started with IntelliJ IDEA, I installed a plugin into Android Studio to see Kotlin work correctly. It’s a good feeling to know that I am using 1.0.0 of Kotlin. Did you know that Kotlin started in 2010?

RxJava

With Kotlin knowledge and plugin installed, we move on to RxJava. There’s an insightful and well done Berlin droidcon video by Ivan Morgillo titled Android reactive programming with RxJava. In the context of the Android world, he goes over the concepts of Rx and shows some great RxJava examples.

Android Reactive Programming with RxJava

Ivan is also the author of an RxJava book titled RxJava Essentials released in mid-2015.

Looking around, I see 2016 RxJava Basics by Cosmin Stefan-Dobrin presentation slides that have some good content in there too. Two very interesting slides in there have the title: “Retrofit and RxJava, sitting in a tree.” Although outside of the scope of this article, Retrofit is worth a look.

Finally, there is an RxJava community on Glitter. Having used the RxSwift community on Slack, I know the importance of a strong and supportive community.

All together, it looks like Kotlin and RxJava have what is needed to help one be successful with their Kotlin / RxJava / Android adventure!