After a short break, we’re back with Part 2 of this series on Spring Framework, Confluent Cloud, and the Kotlin language. Many organizations that write applications and microservices for the JVM have chosen Spring Framework, leveraging the many libraries available for features such as REST services, persisting data to a variety of datastores, and integration with messaging. These organizations have existing investments in building, testing, deploying, and monitoring applications using Spring.

Kotlin Generics are a way to use generics in Kotlin that have type parameters specified to their usage. This powerful tool defines code components so that they will work with any data type in a flexible and reusable manner – and the main advantage of Kotlin Generics is how they are statically-typed.

Kotlin was built to replace Java. Or at least, supersede it for a wide range of Android development tasks. Released by JetBrains in 2016, it is designed to address some of Java’s drawbacks and provide a smoother, faster alternative for devs everywhere. So really the question in the title is redundant, right? Kotlin is just better, surely? Well, actually it’s much more nuanced than that.

Hey, you! Yeah, you! The puzzled-looking Spring Boot developer, scouring the web for a guide on integrating your microservices with Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud with Stream Governance. Admit it, you’ve been Googling nonstop for the past hour and all you’ve found are examples using StringSerializer/StringDeserializer with not even the slightest mention of "schema registry-aware" serialization methods. And I bet the examples you found are implemented in Java.

In Kotlin, an enum (short for enumerator) is a special kind of predefined Kotlin data type used to store and represent a fixed set of named constant values, often simply referred to as constants. Each constant is an object, meaning they can have properties and methods, these are enums and are useful for representing elements that are fixed (for example days of the week) and don’t change.

Unit testing is one of the most powerful features of Android app development, saving us crucial time and reducing overall project cost and allowing developers to embrace test driven development With unit testing, we take an individual slice of code and test it to our requirements. If it passes, then the slice of code is pushed to the repository to merge with the existing code. If it fails, the developers fix the error and retest until it passes.

In Android app development, creating a smooth, responsive user experience is essential. Kotlin coroutines help developers achieve this by streamlining and speeding up the app’s background operations. Kotlin coroutines significantly simplify the way we write asynchronous code and they allow any Android developer to easily run a background task or an asynchronous task.

An array is like a box with compartments, where you can store a set number of items of the same kind. Arrays play a crucial role in Kotlin, helping us hold many items together. They allow us to send multiple values to a function easily, or make various changes to the data. There are various different forms of arrays in Kotlin, including the object-type array, represented by something called the array class.

Kotlin has gradually replaced Java as the lingua franca of Android programming. It’s a more concise language than Java, meaning your code works harder and you can build leaner applications. And Kotlin Collections are fundamental. These collections play a fundamental role in our work as programmers by simplifying the organization and management of data. Whether it’s a list, set, map or other data structure, they allow us to categorize and store data logically.