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Kotlin Apprentice

Third Edition · Android 11 · Kotlin 1.4 · IntelliJ IDEA 2020.3

Before You Begin

Section 0: 4 chapters
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Section I: Kotlin Basics

Section 1: 7 chapters
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Section II: Collections & Lambdas

Section 2: 3 chapters
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Section III: Building Your Own Types

Section 3: 8 chapters
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Section IV: Intermediate Topics

Section 4: 9 chapters
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12. Objects
Written by Tori Gonda

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Kotlin introduces a new keyword that is unavailable in other languages Kotlin is often compared to, such as Java and Swift: The object keyword.

Like Java and Swift, Kotlin supports object-oriented programming. As you saw in Chapter 11, “Classes,” you use classes to define custom types, and instances of classes are called objects.

Kotlin uses object to denote a custom type that can only have a single instance. The name choice for the object keyword can sometimes lead to confusion with class instances, since they’re also called objects. As you’ll see in this chapter, you can also use object to create anonymous objects, for which a new instance is created each time the anonymous object is used, another potential source of confusion.

This chapter will help you make sense of this potential confusion.

In discussing your code, you’ll often have to rely on the context to determine whether an “object” is a class instance, the single instance of an entity created using object or an anonymous object.

The object keyword lets you easily implement a common pattern in software development: The singleton pattern.

Singletons

The singleton pattern is one of the more straightforward of the software engineering design patterns. In most object-oriented languages, the pattern is used when you want to restrict a class to have a single instance during any given run of an application.

There are a few hurdles you must typically jump in order to create a singleton, in terms of setting up the single instance and performing the restriction to one object. Use of singletons is sometimes discouraged because they introduce a global state into your application; therefore, you must be careful when accessing a singleton from different application threads. But singletons are useful in certain use cases wherein the scope of use is limited.

Kotlin addresses some of these concerns by giving you a built-in way to create singletons.

Named objects

The object keyword in Kotlin lets you define a type that only has a single instance — a named object.

Getting started

Open the chapter starter project and create a new file by right-clicking on the src folder and choosing New ▸ Kotlin File/Class and naming the file X:

Singleton use cases

An example use case for a singleton is an in-memory repository for a set of data. Consider an app that needs a registry of students who are defined with the following data class. Add this class to objects.kt:

Comparison to classes

While constructors are not allowed for objects, they do have many similarities with classes:

Using static members

One of the students you define in this chapter, Emmy Noether, was a key contributor to the theory of conservation laws in physics. There appears to be a “law of conservation of keywords” because, while Kotlin has gained the object keyword, it’s also lost a keyword found in other languages like Java and Swift: There is no static keyword in Kotlin.

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Creating companion objects

You create the companion object by prepending companion to an object defined in the class. Add this class to your file:

Companion naming and accessing from Java

The companion object is given an implicit name of Companion. You can use a custom name by adding it after the companion object keywords:

Mini-exercise

Update the Student data class from above to keep track of how many students have been created. Use a companion object method numberOfStudents() to get the number of student instances.

Using anonymous objects

Anonymous classes are used in Java to override the behavior of existing classes without the need to subclass, and also to implement interfaces without defining a concrete class. In both cases, the compiler creates a single anonymous instance, to which no name need be given. You’ll learn more about inheritance in Chapter 15, “Advanced Classes,” and interfaces in Chapter 17, “Interfaces.”

Challenges

  1. Create a named object that lets you check whether a given Int value is above a threshold. Name the object Threshold and add a method isAboveThreshold(value: Int).
  2. Create a version of the Student class that uses a factory method loadStudent(studentMap: Map<String, String>) to create a student with a first and last name from a map such as mapOf("first_name" to "Neils", "last_name" to "Bohr"). Default to using “First” and “Last” as the names if the map not contain a first name or last name.
  3. Create an anonymous object that implements the following interface:

Key points

Where to go from here?

As you’ve seen in this chapter, just like classes, objects have properties and methods, and there’s more to learn about for both. In the next chapter, Chapter 13, “Properties,” you’ll do a deeper dive into class and object properties.

11. Classes
13. Properties
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