Swift to Kotlin Android Conversion Training in South Africa

It is assumed that delegates will have several years experience in Swift / iOS and be familiar with the core concepts of object-oriented and functional programming.

Core Concepts of the Java Platform

• How Kotlin emerged from Java and Scala
• The current JSE platform and toolset
• Why Google broke Android away from Oracle
• Java 8+ features not available on Android
• How Kotlin modernises coding on Android
• Creating Kotlin projects in IntelliJ Community
• Creating mobile apps in Android Studio

Core Tooling in JSE and Android

• Comparing XCode to Android Studio
• Managing dependencies using Gradle
• Pros and cons of Android emulators
• How Intel HAXM improves emulation speeds
• Configuring sample devices for testing
• Developer features available on devices
• Command-line interaction using ADB

Making the Most of Android Studio

• Core functionality of Android Studio
• Best practises for editing Kotlin codebases
• Working with the Layout Inspector and Editor
• Configuring the SDK and AVD Manager
• Monitoring resource usage via the Profiler
• Viewing and filtering logs via LogCat

Converting from Swift to Kotlin

• Minor variations in the basic syntax
• Mutability in Kotlin vs. Swift
• Similarities in support for OO and FP
• Limitations of class extensions in Kotlin
• Differences in working with collections
• Representing ranges in Swift and Kotlin
• Optionals in Swift vs. null safety in Kotlin
• Swift has tuples, Kotlin has Pair and Triple
• Destructuring data classes and lists in Kotlin
• Shorthand notation for parameters in closures
• Comparing protocols in Swift to Kotlin interfaces
• Taking advantage of reflection and delegates

Essentials of Android Applications

• Android has no Storyboard equivalent
• Understanding and editing the Manifest File
• Introducing Android Activities and Fragments
• Navigation between Activities and Fragments
• How a device manages the lifecycle of an Activity
• Designing an application around the MVVM pattern
• Using databinding to push data into the model

Building Basic User Interfaces

• Specifying a view hierarchy as XML
• Reasons to avoid specifying hierarchies in code
• Limits of the ‘drag and drop’ approach in the IDE
• Using and combining the standard Android widgets
• The support libraries and targeting legacy versions of Android
• Special considerating when accepting textual input
• Positioning widgets by creating and nesting layouts
• Different options for attaching event handlers to views
• Using binding adapters to bind views to data sources
• Customizing widgets using styles and themes
• Creating new widgets by extending existing ones

Enhancing the User Interface

• Understanding the lifecycle of an Activity
• How to preserve mutable state via callbacks and bundles
• Starting one activity from another via intents
• Processing intents using filtering and receivers
• Creating and using files in a range of locations
• Advantages of Kotlin Coroutines over AsyncTask
• Using the JetBrains Kotlin Android Extensions
• Using the Google Android Kotlin Extensions

Dependency Injection

• Using the Dagger framework for DI
• Understanding Compile Time Injection
• Configuring dependencies via @Inject
• Using @Provides for factory methods
• Considerations when injecting into Activities

Reactive Coding in Android

• Review of Rx and the RxJava framework
• Using RxKotlin for syntactic sugar
• Combining Rx and Kotlin Coroutines

Accessing RESTful Services

• Introducing the Retrofit library
• Creating service clients via annotations
• Support for reactive streams in Retrofit
• Marshalling to and from JSON and XML
• Customizing object serialization

Persistence in Android

• Supported databases on Android devices
• Persisting data in SQLite using Room
• Using annotations to specify Entity Types
• Using annotations to specify Data Access Objects
• Migrating databases between schema versions
• Switching databases for testing

Security in Android

• Managing key pairs via the Android Keystore
• The security model and permissions available
• Prompting the user to acquire permissions
• Signing applications for distribution

Background Processing

• Android services and their lifecycles
• Using the Work Manager for scheduling jobs

Testing Android Applications

• TDD with JUnit, Mockito and Hamcrest
• User Interface testing with Espresso
• Best practices for running tests in CI/CD
• Options for mocking RESTful services

Deploying and Monitoring Applications

• Platforms for distributing beta versions
• Options for recording and reporting crashes
• Techniques for monitoring the full system