Kotlin is a programming language that was released in 2011 by JetBrains, a company that sells integrated development environments (IDEs) for programming languages. Since then, it’s become a favorite language for developers and replaced Java in many software projects. Nowadays, automation testing has proved to be an important component within the cycle of software development and even more for the agile development of software. Being an automated process makes easier to perform repetitive tests, end to end business flows, covering many scenarios, which would be very difficult and costly to perform manually. Swift has a modern look and feel, but it still continues the tradition of Apple’s Objective-C, having many features and unique design choices that few modern languages outside of Apple’s ecosystem make.
As reactive programming takes hold of the minds of developers, the ergonomics of working with immutable data becomes a full-front concern for the language and that is one of the areas we plan to be investing heavily in the next ten years. I personally do expect a similar change to happen on the server-side later in this decade, with the focus shifting from mutable data to immutable, from imperative to more functional reactive code. Kotlin is not just a language for mobile app development, in spite of its huge success in this arena with over 80% of the top 1,000 apps in the Play Store using Kotlin. In fact, according to JetBrains, over 4,800,000 developers, have used Kotlin for server-side, mobile multiplatform, Android, and front-end development.
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With Aqua, you get access to your Docker containers, allowing you to run and debug them, download and build images, and run multi-container applications. Use smart search to jump to any class, file, symbol, IDE action, or tool window. To use it, press Shift twice and start typing the name of whatever you are looking for. InfoQ has taken the chance to speak with Kotlin project lead at JetBrains, Roman Elizarov to learn more about its past, present, and future. Learn what’s next in software from world-class leaders pushing the boundaries. This tutorial will show you how to write a simple unit test and run it with the Gradle build tool.
As a full-stack, multiplatform language, Kotlin is just at the beginning of its road. The whole Kotlin multiplatform was announced just in 2017 and is still experimental. However, we see a tremendous amount of interest and engagements from our community, very similar to the feedback we were getting back then before Kotlin went 1.0. So, again, we are taking a measured approach and are not rushing to stabilize https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/qa-automation-engineer-javakotlin/ anything until it passed the test of time and got real-life feedback. Based on that past history, as we stabilize various pieces of Kotlin multiplatform, starting from Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM), we expect the adoption to significantly pick up the pace. The modern features of the language make it possible for Web Developers to build applications that can scale quickly on commodity hardware.
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You can seamlessly handle multiple databases, develop SQL scripts, and perform low-level data assertions right in the IDE. Aqua provides connections to live databases, runs queries, exports data, and allows you to manage schemes in a visual interface. This means you can access Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other databases from the IDE. A few months ago Kotlin reached version 1.5, which introduced interop support for a number of recent Java features, including record classes, sealed interfaces, and inline classes. Additionally, the Kotlin compiler switched to a new JVM intermediate representation with the aim to improve performance and provide the foundation for new language features. Kotlin can be installed as part of IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio or cloning its GitHub repo.
Only three years after that, Google made it the language of choice for Android development, which quickly led to over 60% of professional Android developers adopting it. Google commitment to Kotlin got another corroboration recently with the release of Jetpack Compose 1.0, entirely developed using that language and heavily leveraging its syntax capabilities. Our Learn Kotlin course is perfect if you’re a new developer or new to the Kotlin language. It’ll introduce you to fundamental programming concepts and teach you how to write Kotlin code.
Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile Content Creators ↗
When Web Inspector is active, CSS and XPath code completion suggests and highlights locators for the most important web page elements. Just validate your CSS selector or XPath with Web Inspector and check whether the locator identified the element you want. When following the Page Object pattern, the IDE helps you create and maintain new page object files from the New File menu and respects the selected page object pattern when adding locators. We’re launching a public preview of JetBrains Aqua so everyone can try it out and influence the design.
Kotlin is a cross-platform, statically typed language with a modern and concise syntax that aimed to overcome Java deficiencies at a time when Java development was stagnating. Among Kotlin key features are null safety, coroutines, data classes, extension functions, and more. So if you are a tester or developer walking your first steps in writing automated tests or even if you are an experienced one, keep in mind that with Kotlin you can target almost every aspect of your test automation with much less effort. What if, in this time and day, we could find only one that gives us the best ratio between coverage, amazing libraries, ease of use and platform support, wouldn’t that be a no-brainer? It would, so you should take some time to consider if this language already exists. Tests usually contain links to issue trackers and TMS (test management systems).
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Creating a separate tool for automated test development was a natural step for us, as it allows us to cover the needs of multi-role software development teams. In Kotlin we are taking a radically more measured approach to expanding core language and core libraries. We are making sure that Kotlin will stay relevant for dozens of years to come. Moreover, we don’t have illusions that any code could be run anywhere. Our vision is that developers will explicitly keep the list of platforms they want their code to run on in their mind and there will always be some differences between the platforms that need to be occasionally taken into account.
- But since test automation can also be described as a development discipline, all the good things Kotlin brings for creating apps or backends, it’s applicable for test automation as well.
- Moreover, we don’t have illusions that any code could be run anywhere.
- The embedded Web Inspector allows you to view web applications in Aqua and capture page elements required for automated tests.
- In hindsight, Kotlin’s rapid growth on Android was logical, even though it was never planned for.
- Data Scientists can use all the standard Java libraries that they used for Java projects but write their own code in Kotlin.
- However, while the immediate goal was to design a better Java, the inspiration was taken from a variety of languages, both production, and experimental ones.
You can write great application software in Rust, but it will come with a steeper learning curve for developers, more effort, and more verbose code to tell Rust compiler what exactly you want to do. Kotlin is a modern programming language that can run side by side with Java while being easier to write. If you want to develop Android apps or multi-platform applications with the JVM, you can do it quicker and simpler with Kotlin than with Java. Kotlin is a modern but already mature programming language designed to make developers happier.
Aqua provides rich support for the Selenium API and Selenide, offering code insight for the CSS, XPath, and JavaScript fragments used in the Selenium API and many other libraries for UI testing. Make the most of the IDE’s code intelligence with safe Rename and Delete, Extract Method, Introduce Variable, Inline Variable or Method, and other refactorings. Language and framework-specific refactorings help you make project-wide changes. Since Kotlin’s stable release in 2016, the team has taken backward compatibility very seriously, and that is when the real growth and adoption of Kotlin has started. Being a language for industry, the team’s strong focus on ensuring backward compatibility had paid off over time. Kotlin/JS allows developers to access powerful browser and web APIs in a type-safe fashion.
I like to automate things, and in our work whatever commodity or optimization where I get the same or better results with less effort, I will at least try it. Since I started using Kotlin instead of Java for my test automation I haven’t looked back. But we need to unify the anecdote, not to speak on specific usages on a specific layer, but rather to summarize that you can use Kotlin for almost everything related to test automation development, period.
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