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The only difficulty I ran into is that the IDE's Kotlin plugins only work with gradle version 4.1 and up. I'm using IntelliJ IDEA, and our project was already set up to use Gradle. In my specific case, I started with our code sample from two weeks ago. In this article, we'll take a simple Appium Java test, and convert it to Kotlin in just a few minutes! Read: Capturing Network Traffic in Java with Appium This allows for a gradual transition, rather than the risks of a complete rewrite. A Java project can have some code files in Kotlin, a Kotlin program can import Java libraries, and with a little extra work, Java programs can import Kotlin libraries. What many readers may not know, is that Kotlin code can be easily integrated into a Java project.
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Kotlin has many features which clean up some of the longstanding issues with Java, and also just gives a fresh start, without needing to support legacy decisions and APIs. Test your mobile apps and browsers on real Android devices. It is the officially preferred language for Android app development, and a friend of mine is even rewriting his team's backend API in Kotlin. The compiled code runs on the JVM, it is supported by Java IDEs, and its syntax is very similar to Java.
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While this news is great, it poses concerns for developers who will eventually need to update their existing Java code to the new language.
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At Google I/O 2017, it was announced that Kotlin will become the official language for Android development.
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