Building Android Apps with Kotlin: Getting Started

Course Overview
Hi everyone! My name's Alex Dunn, and welcome to my course on Building Android Apps with Kotlin: Getting Started. I'm an application architect and instructor that's shipped dozens of production mobile apps. I've received MVP awards from Xamarin and Microsoft for my involvement in the mobile app development community and can be found speaking at mobile development events all around Boston. The popularity of Android development is growing quickly, and since Google announced Kotlin's official support within the Android platform, development just got even easier. Kotlin's strengths alongside Android's flexibility give us an environment with fewer hassles and even more fun. This course is going to provide you with a foundation of both Android and Kotlin skills to bring to your own applications, as well as a real-world example app to reference. Some of the major topics we'll cover include the foundation of Android applications, using remote data over HTTP, storing data locally on the device, useful libraries and tools, and, of course, Kotlin as the language to write it all in. By the end of this course, you'll know how to build your own native Android apps from scratch using Kotlin instead of Java. But before beginning the course, you should be familiar with some basic object-oriented concepts with other languages like Java or C# or Ruby or really any others. But no prior knowledge of Android or Kotlin is required. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn about both Android and Kotlin with the Building Android Apps with Kotlin: Getting Started course at Pluralsight.

Getting Started
Hi! I'm Alex Dunn, and welcome to my course on getting started with building Android apps using Kotlin. In this course, we will explore the world of Android from a new perspective with a fresh new programming language. Together, we'll follow a real-world story and build a fully robust application that encompasses features that most real-world apps need for a foundation. This includes a beautiful UI built on Material Design, interfacing with external data through an API, local databases, and a data-drive UI. Now let's dive in and get things started. In this module on getting started, we'll take a look at what to expect from each module and how they come together to complete the course. We'll look at the types of Android development skills to take away and the requirements of the app we'll be building, along with the story we'll follow while doing so. We'll then move into setting up our development environment with Android Studio and Kotlin, look at the project types we can start with, and kick off our app's project before digging into some code.

Creating and Managing Views and Activities
Welcome to the next module on building Android apps with Kotlin, Creating and Managing Views and Activities. I'm Alex Dunn, and I'll be leading you through your mission to build a great new Android app for Wikipedia using the latest tools and technology. In this module, we'll take a quick step back to go over some of the basics of how Android handles applications and expand on how to build user interfaces. We'll talk about what goes into building an Android app and all of the different components that end up coming together, Android activities and how they work together, the lifecycle of an Android activity, using components that are available to us either out of the box or from one of Google's Android support libraries to complete our UI, how Android handles resources such as images, layouts, styles, and more, and then we'll take the lessons learned and start applying them to our Wikipedia application all while looking at some of the ways Kotlin in particular makes our lives easier when building out our activities and views.

Creating and Managing Fragments
Welcome to the next module on building Android apps with Kotlin titled Creating and Managing Fragments. We previously learned about what goes into an Android app and how to build activities and views. Now we're going to cover the last piece of Android application interfaces and dive deeper into fragments. In this module, we're going to be covering the basics of what a fragment is. We'll look at the fragment lifecycle and compare it to the activity lifecycle we learned about in the previous module, as well as how these two work together. Then we'll talk about how to use fragments in our Android applications and look at some of the views and controls we can use that revolve around the use of fragments. After learning all about fragments, we'll move back to Android Studio and build out fragments for the Explore, History, and Favorites pages including creating them, wiring them up, updating their layouts, and with this complete, the foundation of our interface will be done, and we'll be able to move on to interacting with Wikipedia data.

Getting Started with the Wikipedia API and Kotlin Models
Welcome to another module on building Android apps with Kotlin. I'm Alex Dunn, and in this module, I'll be taking you through the Wikipedia API and Kotlin models to handle our data. In this module, we'll take a look at how Kotlin models work. We'll also talk about how we can map JSON to Kotlin models to be able to use it in our code. We'll then look at how the Wikipedia API works in order to get data from Wikipedia. Then we'll create our models in our app that we'll be able to use from the Wikipedia API to map to data that we'll be using in the UI that we created previously.

Accessing External Data from Wikipedia
Welcome to another module of Building Android Apps with Kotlin. In this module, we'll be talking about accessing the external data from the Wikipedia APIs. We'll do a brief introduction into HTTP and learn about making HTTP requests, as well as a brief look at how we can connect to the internet in other ways. We'll start making requests in Java and then compare them to how we'll be making requests in Kotlin. We'll look at some helpful libraries and tools that are going to make our lives easier in building these requests and getting the data from the APIs. We'll also talk about how we can actually use the data from the APIs and map them to the modules we created in the previous module. Then we'll go ahead and update our Wikipedia app to go and pull data by creating a provider class that'll communicate to the API with two functions to search and get random articles.

Adding Functionality and Data to the View
Welcome to another module on Building Android Apps with Kotlin. In this module, we'll be talking about adding functionality and data to the view that we created in our application. In this module, we'll be looking at how we can do things such as pass data between different activities, create data-driven controls such as RecyclerViews and how we update that with actual data. Then after learning a bit about this, we're going to head over into our Wikipedia app and set up our Explore page to use data from Wikipedia. We'll then set up the Search page to add actual search functionality and display articles. And then we'll set up the Article Detail page within the ArticleDetailActivity to pass information from the Explore and Search pages when an article is selected.

Storing Local Data
Welcome to another module on Building Android Apps with Kotlin. In this module, we're going to talk about storing local data on the device itself separate from using external data like we did with using the Wikipedia API. So in this module, we'll take a look at what storing data really means within building Android applications. We'll look at some different ways that we can do this within Android with some of the stuff that's built in. Then we'll take a look at some libraries that use these different types of storage and make our lives easier as developers by wrapping some of the complicated code. Then we'll go into our Wikipedia app code and add some repositories and DBHelpers in order to properly store our favorited articles and our previously viewed articles into History and Favorites repositories.

Updating Views with Offline Data and Future Steps
Welcome to another module on Buidling Android apps with Kotlin. In this module, we'll be wrapping up our Wikipedia application by updating our views with the offline data from our repositories, then talking about some future steps you can take as an Android developer to learn more. In this module, we're going to do things a little bit backwards in the sense that we're going to jump right into Android Studio from the get-go rather than learning something new right away. We're going to go into Android Studio and add a new favorite button to the toolbar of our ArticleDetailActivity to allow users to toggle this article off and on in the Favorites. We'll then update the HistoryFragment and FavoritesFragment to update their recyclers to handle the articles that are pulled in from the offline storage in our repositories. Then we'll do a little bit of touchup to the UI to make sure our users have the greatest experience they can get out of our application. After this, our application will be done, and we'll move into talking about some future research topics to look at. Then we'll summarize what we've gone over in this course including everything we've put into our Wikipedia application and given over to the Wikipedia team.