Are you a growing android programmer in the industry?
Do you work using Kotlin as a programming language?
If you nod to ‘Yes’ to both these questions, read this article till the end. In this article, we are going to discuss the top 7 highly efficient and easy-to-use Kotlin libraries that you can use in your next app development project.
Today, we will be sharing with you about these top 7 highly efficient and easy-to-use Libraries which you can start using right after reading this piece.
Valiktor
When you are working in an Object Oriented Programming language, it is quite necessary you validate the objects used in the program.
Now writing a complete set of codes from scratch may bore you; however, you have a library right there in Kotlin’s treasure.
Valiktor is an extensible library which you can use as a powerful tool in your program to validate the objects.
Valiktor has a powerful main function which calls the desired object and an unidentified function to validate that object.
For each data type, it offers you numerous extension functions and various validation constraints.
This library helps you validate the nested objects and arrays including their properties and elements recurrently.
Supporting decoupled internationalization, Valiktor allows you to retain the logic of validation in the core of the application and carries our internationalization in a new layer, such as a RESTful adapter.
FlexboxLayout
While developing a mobile application, it is very important that the app’s UX design gets an optimized CSS box model and layouts in one dimension.
FlexboxLayout helps you attain the same capabilities in your Android Application development.
This library function gives you the flexibility to use it in two ways in your layout:
- Specifying attributes from a layout XML or from code
- It can be used within RecyclerView
It helps to recycle the views going off the screen to reuse for the views appearing as user scrolls. Check this image for example.
Also, it consumes less memory in case of a huge number of items stored in the Flexbox container.
It supports a good number of useful attributes such as a few mentioned here:
- flexDirection: determines the direction of the main axis in which the children items are kept in the Flexbox Layout
- flexWrap: controls the flex container checking whether it’s single-line or multi-line. Also, the direction of cross-axis.
- justify-content and align items: controls alignment along the main and cross axis respectively.
Anko
Anko comes up as a Kotlin library which can help you develop your Android application faster and in an easier manner.
Making your code easy and clean to read, Anko vanishes the thought to check the rough edges of the SDK for Java.
Anko carries four parts in its whole set helping you to write a neat and clean code:
Anko Commons
A library full of helpers for the Android SDK
Anko Layouts
use it and write dynamic layouts for your android application
Anko SQLite
gives you the helpers to ease working with the tiring SQLite databases
Anko Coroutines
based on library functions of kotlinx.coroutines, it offers you the functions to present the code in a common pool and create a weak reference wrapper.
Ktor
A library which can help you efficiently design Web Applications as well with a very nominal effort.
Inspired from the web frameworks like Wasabi and Kara, it works on the principles that make it highly helpful to increase your Web Application development efficiency:
It is Unopinionated
With no imposition of constraints on the matter of technology a project needs to use, it allows the developer to flexibly choose the technology they feel can be better for their project such as logging, messaging, etc.
You can host the Ktor application in any servlet container using Servlet 3.0+ API support like Tomcat or a standalone like Netty or Jetty.
It’s Asynchronous
To provide Asynchronous programming model, its pipeline mechanism and API uses kotlinx.coroutines.
And Testable
Without ignoring much stuff, it eases the app testing and helps to attain good performance when validating app calls.
Kovenant
It brings the promises for Kotlin being an easy asynchronous library with the extensions for JavaFX, Android and a lot more.
It has been structured in various sub-projects for you to handpick as per your needs such as kovenant-core, kovenan-jvm, kovenant-rx and many others.
KAndroid
Dedicated to helping you with Android, it provides you with useful extensions to eradicate the repetitive (boilerplate) code in Android SDK and you can focus more on efficiency.
You can use it in Binding Views, Accessing ViewGroup children, as a TextWatcher, SearchView and SeekBar extensions, and various others.
You can also use it for functions such as Logging, Threading, Layout inflater, Toast messages, for using System Services, Loading Animation from XML and Web Intents with URL validation.
Fuel
As its name suggests, it is there to fuel up your Kotlin program.
It is one of the easiest networking libraries for Kotlin.
It can amaze you with its vibrant features such as:
- Sending and canceling Asynchronous requests and blocking requests
- API routing
- Available to download as a file
- Requests as coroutines
- Debug logging and convert to the cURL call and many others
Offers you support to install in Maven and jetpack.
You can quick start with sending its requests and those can be made on the Fuel namespace object or you can use any of the String extension methods.
Also, it has been released under the MIT license, which is again very useful for the Kotlin programmers.
Which one did you like the most?
As we know that Kotlin is a booming object-oriented programming language, it becomes quite necessary to gather knowledge about its various offerings.
Kotlin libraries prove to be quite helpful to the programmers as they are open source and available with a lot of ease to acquire.
Every library mentioned above has its own kind of functionalities which prove to be useful in all the required aspects of Kotlin programming.
