Kotlin Koans—Part 15

Kotlin supports API that is similar to what is offered by Java 8 Streams. In this portion of the Kotlin Koans tutorial, I had to work with filtering and mapping. As an added bonus, I saw a good use case for Kotlin’s operator overloading capabilities and it’s collection transformation capabilities.

Here is the Kotlin code

fun Shop.getCitiesCustomersAreFrom(): Set {
    return customers.map { it.city }.toSet()
}

fun Shop.getCustomersFrom(city: City): List {
    return customers.filter { it.city == city }
}

The first function has us extracting all cities out the customers. In this example, customer has a city property. We can therefore us the map function to drill down to the city property on customer and gather than into a collection. Once we have our customers, we can use the toSet() method to transform the collection into a set.

The second function has us using a predicate to filter customers by city. Kotlin has operator overloading so we can use the == to compare object equality in Kotlin rather than reference equality in Kotlin.

Kotlin has to offer Android developers in this case. Java developers have much of these features as of JDK 8. One thing I noticed in particular was that you do not need to call stream() on collections in Kotlin. I don’t find this to be a huge surprise however. Much of the Java 8 functionality came in the form of the new Streams api, which they attached to the collection framework. Kotlin seems to have built such features directly into the collection classes.

You can click here to see Part 14