Kotlin

You may have heard of Graal, the new JIT compiler for the JVM written in Java. It is available inside the JDK since Java10 and in the future will probably become the standard of the JDK. If you are interested, you can find more information here: https://www.infoq.com/articles/Graal-Java-JIT-Compiler In the last year I mostly worked with Kotlin and as personal project I ...

So, this came out over a month late… Woops. This is definitely not my original idea in the least. I wish I knew where I originally found this so I could share that, but seeing that I can’t find it and I haven’t seen it anywhere else, I’d like to share this idea so it can become more well-known. What ...

Kotlin allows you to put method implementation in an interface. The same mechanism can be found in Java interfaces as default methods (and also Groovy or Scala traits). Let’s see the difference between the Kotlin and Java default methods in interface by testing it with Groovy and Spock. What do we want to test? We often have an interface for ...

I’ll try to explain the language syntax as simple as possible, however, the article still appeals to developers who consider Kotlin as a language for custom DSL building. At the end of the article I’ll mention Kotlin drawbacks worth taking into account. The presented code snippets are relevant for Kotlin version 1.2.0 and are available on GitHub. What is DSL? ...

The enum class with instance method in Kotlin is quite similar to its Java version, but they are look a bit different in the bytecode. Let’s see the difference by writing some tests using Spock. What do we want to test? Let’s see the code that we want to test: enum class EnumWithInstanceMethod { PLUS { override fun sign(): String ...

Introduction In Kotlin, classes do not have static methods. A Java equivalent semantic can be provided to callers using the concept of a companion object though. This post will go into details of what it takes to support a JUnit 5 @BeforeAll and @AfterAll annotation which depend on the precense of a static methods in test classes. BeforeAll and AfterAll in Java Junit ...

The object keyword in Kotlin creates singleton in a very convenient way. It can be used for example as a state of an operation. Spock Framework is one of the most expressive and readable test framework available in the Java ecosystem. Let’s see how Kotlin object can be used in the Spock tests. What do we want to test? We ...

Some people have spoken against Kotlin’s decision to make classes, methods, etc. public by default (when no visibility modifier is used), and I would just like to pitch in on why I think JetBrains made the right decision on this one. Those who are against it bring up the principle of hiding everything that you can get away with in ...

This post walks through a sample that demonstrates Kotlin’s ability to cleverly reify generic type parameters. So consider first a world where Kotlin does not support this feature, if we were using the Jackson library to convert a JSON to a Map with String based keys and Integer based values, I would use a code along these lines: @Test fun `sample ...