About This Series
This “Android Kotlin Basics” blog series is all about fundamentals. We’ll take a look at the basics of building Android apps with Kotlin from the SUPER basics, to the standard basics, to the not-so-basics. We’ll also be drawing comparisons to how things are done in Kotlin vs. Java and some other programming languages to build Android apps (like C# and Xamarin or JavaScript/TypeScript for Hybrid implementations).
Check Out the Pluralsight Course!
If you like this series, be sure to check out my course on Pluralsight – Building Android Apps with Kotlin: Getting Started where you can learn more while building your own real-world application in Kotlin along the way. You can also join the conversation and test your knowledge throughout the course with learning checks through each module!
Watch it here: https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/building-android-apps-kotlin-getting-started/table-of-contents
Kotlin “val” and “var”
This one is pretty simple, especially for those coming from Java, but seeing the left side of the argument when creating either a property or local variable as “val” or “var” can be pretty weird.
Here’s what I’m talking about – let’s create a class that has two properties, one that is a value and one that is a variable (see what I did there?).
class Dog() {
val bark: String = "Bark"
var name: String? = null // set this later
fun speak() : String {
// throw an error if name is null
val log = name!! + " said " + bark
prntln(log)
return log
}
}
The quick answer is that val – being a “value” can only be set once. This is just like using the final keyword in Java. var on the other hand is a “variable” and can be set later on or can have it’s value changed whenever.
Using val in your properties makes it readonly. If you’re coming from C#, it’s like adding the readonly keyword to your class’s property, since it is a val and properties need to have a value set during the init or constructor of the class. We’ll talk more about class initialization and constructors in another post of this series.
By using val and var in the Kotlin language, it allows us to always have our properties and local variables aligned vertically which makes the readability of our code that little bit better!
In the next post, we’ll look at how Kotlin handles null references and helps us write safer code and get rid of the dreaded NullPointerException or NullReferenceException!
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Alex Dunn 