As application developers, we are told we should always update libraries to the latest version as they contain bug fixes, security improvements, and increased compatibility with more devices. With a major iOS and Android update happening every year along with new build and development tools being released all the time, mobile developers are constantly making updates to their codebase to support the changing requirements, often resulting in quicker development cycles while reducing the amount of code necessary to accomplish a task.īeyond the official tools and frameworks used to build an application there exists numerous libraries for handling in-app data storage, networking, serialization, threading, or in the case of the Nimbus SDK, rendering ads each with their own release cycles and dependencies that are included in a build. It can also be useful for communication between UI components: an adapter can pass click events to its Fragment/Activity via a Channel or an Actor for example.One of the fun challenges about working in mobile development is keeping up with the rapidly evolving landscape. We can also create channels with the Produce function. To be continuedĬhannel framework can be used in many other ways, you can look at BroadcastChannel for more powerful implementations according to your needs. JakeWharton/retrofit2-kotlin-coroutines-adapter is also available with another implementation, for the same result. This implementation is inspired by gildor/kotlin-coroutines-retrofit library, which makes it ready to use.

This way, the network blocking call is done in Retrofit dedicated thread, coroutine is here to wait for the response, and in-app usage couldn’t be simpler! Main ) // usage (within Main coroutine context) livedata.

In it, we retrieve an image from the IO one, and process it back in Main. Very simple first example, we launch a coroutine in the Main context (main thread). The goal here is to avoid callbacks and make concurrency easier. Its philosophy is to define an execution context which allows to wait for background operations to complete, without blocking the original thread. Suspending vs blockingĬoroutines do not replace threads, it’s more like a framework to manage it. With coroutines, kotlin brings a very efficient and complete framework to manage concurrency in a more performant and simple way. Callbacks mitigation (Part 2): RetrofitĬurrent Java/Android concurrency framework leads to callback hells and blocking states because we do not have any other simple way to guarantee thread safety.

Callbacks and locks elimination with channels.

Modern concurrency on Android with Kotlin

Github android kotlin