A Few Astronomical Examples in Kotlin

The website Open Notify provides a few URLs that return JSON data from NASA. There are currently three links supported: Number of people in space Current location of the International Space Station Overhead pass predictions for the ISS Just for fun, this blog post uses Kotlin to access each one, transform the results in Kotlin… Read More

Kotlin Palindrome Checker

This post, based on code from my new Kotlin Cookbook, shows how to write a palindrome checker in Kotlin. Along the way it discusses raw strings and regular expressions, writing functions as single statements, and creating an extension function on String. First, a quick definition. A palindrome is a string whose characters are the same… Read More

A Deep Dive into the KotlinVersion Class

Getting the current Kotlin version is easy, but the actual KotlinVersion class is much more interesting. This post shows how to get the Kotlin version programmatically, but then looks at the details of the KotlinVersion class, including how it demonstrates a great way to write an equals method and more. Note that this demo is… Read More

Java 11 HttpClient, Gson, Gradle, and Modularization

This post describes a simple system that uses the new HttpClient class that comes with Java 11 to access a RESTful web service. After demonstrating basic functionality, changes are made to parse the results using Gson, and even modularize the code and have it work with Gradle. The goal is to provide an example for… Read More

Managing Your Manager: The Video Course

I’m a regular speaker on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour (I’m now entering my ninth year, which I can hardly believe), and one of the talks I’ve given there for many years is called “Managing Your Manager”. It’s been one of my most successful talks, and I’ve given several versions of it, including as… Read More

Java 8 Constructor Refs (In All Their Glory)

[Note: my last post announced my new book, Modern Java Recipes, is now available from O’Reilly publishers in Early Release form. As a sample, I included a discussion of the Predicate interface, one of the new functional interfaces in the the java.util.function package. In this post, I highlight constructor references, which are discussed in another… Read More