Kotlin is a JVM language that hit version 1.0 about a year ago (February 2016).
It is developed by JetBrains, the same people who make my favorite suite of
IDEs. The language itself is open-source under the Apache License 2.0 and is
developed as a community project over at kotlinlang.org. Kotlin is something
that I have become rather excited about over the past year. This post’s goal is
not to teach you Kotlin but to get you excited about it!
Howdy, lazy bum! Enjoying the ReactiveX magic? Want to take a look at polling?
I’ll be walking you through a solution I put together for one of our up and coming apps! It works rather well, I learned a lot, and so far no complaints…although there are no users yet either!
Feeling quite charitable, I’m going to let you in on some useful bits and pieces as we build up to polling: threading, late subscribing, replay, manual re-triggering and error handling (a must for preserving replays).
As one would expect with a fine product, it would work best right out of the box. In the case of Android Studio, some assembly is required. The issue I found was that a newly created project with default settings wouldn’t compile. I thought that this bug might have been specific to my setup, but after reproducing it on 3 different computers and finding several outstanding questions as well as a few open bugs with Google concerning the issue, I decided that a fix would be a fine thing to write up, hoping it enables other people to develop as painlessly as possible.
The Android library is constantly growing. New widgets are built, and existing ones get deprecated. We’ll see how we can make XML layouts versioning more maintainable and more OO using the <include/> element. For that we’ll take as an example the ActionBarSherlock SearchView.
When it comes to developing an Android app that deals with sensitive information, you must take extra precautions to make sure that the information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Although Android devices come with state-of-the-art security features, app developers often don’t leverage them. Even if they do, they may not necessarily be using them properly. One simple security hole is all it takes to compromise your app’s security as well as the security of the servers/systems it’s connecting to.
Google’s AppEngine is a very useful platform in the way it allows developers to have an application server up and running within 10 minutes.
It leverages the Google infrastructure, too, offering high speed, high capacity, etc.
Wow (Awesome!)
However (Hmm), AE does not allow for the usual multi-threading mechanisms…