[Proposal] Quickstart Kotlin

[thatfiredev]

It has been more than a year since Kotlin became an official language for Android. It is being widely used by Android Developers and most of android samples and blog posts found on the internet are written in Kotlin nowadays.

I suggest rewriting, in Kotlin, the same android samples contained in this repository. Maybe pushing it to a new repository, since the java samples are also helpful.

[samtstern]

@rosariopfernandes thanks for bringing this up for discussion!

We are definitely working on bringing Kotlin to our Firebase developer materials, alongside Java. The first thing we need to do is get our reference docs in order (since those are the most basic thing) and then we can move on to snippets and samples.

[the-dagger]

@samtstern Any tips on how folks can help the firebase team with the conversion?
Maybe starting off with the reference docs is something that we can help you out with?

[samtstern]

@the-dagger we're actually going to put reference docs on hold for now and jump straight into getting Kotlin snippets alongside the Java snippets in our guides. I will be working with one of our tech writers int the very near future to start this.

I still have to think of a plan for getting Kotlin into this repo in a maintainable way that still makes it easy to navigate. In snippets-android we defined common interface between Kotlin and Java classes but that doesn't work as well for an app.

[the-dagger]

I see, @samtstern that makes sense.
How doing something similar to what the official Android docs do?
They have separate packages for Android and Kotlin for the docs.

This might however be an issue when Dart arrives later on down the line, but happy to brainstorm more on this if you'd like to 👍

[samtstern]

@the-dagger yep that's the most likely course. Can you link me to that repo? Also what editor/theme are you using? Very pretty haha.

[the-dagger]

Sure, here you go!
https://github.com/android/snippets

Let me know if there's a way I can help, happy to do so 🙂

For the theme, I'm using a chrome extension named Octotree, makes it super easy to browser github repos!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjahfmjljalopjnoealnfndnagc

Edit : @samtstern I looked up a bit more on this and found out that Google Maps samples do something very much similar with 2 packages, one in Java and another one in Kotlin.

https://github.com/googlemaps/android-samples/tree/master/ApiDemos

[the-dagger]

@samtstern A gentle reminder on this one.
Really excited to see Kotlin support for the quickstart samples.

[samtstern]

Today I sat down with our writers and hashed out a plan to get Java and Kotlin equality on all docs. Once that's done (will take a bit of effort) the quickstarts are next in line!

…

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018, 3:32 PM Harshit Dwivedi ***@***.***> wrote: @samtstern <https://github.com/samtstern> A gentle reminder on this one. Really excited to see Kotlin support for the quickstart samples. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#557 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AIEw6tc2IRMtm9EQmqe2Ud7ZQi59XNLWks5uMiyPgaJpZM4VJzI2> .

[the-dagger]

Awesome, that sounds like a plan!
Looking forward to it, should be fun haha.

[samtstern]

@the-dagger @rosariopfernandes ok it's now time to start making this a reality. But I think we need to think really carefully about how we want to do this.

Some options:

• Create a whole new module for each quickstart in Kotlin. So auth and auth-kotlin
• Use a different build type / flavor for Kotlin
• Build Kotlin and Java together and insert a first screen in the app where the user decides to run either
  the Kotlin or Java version
• Other?

Some nice things I'd like to preserve:

• Share non-code resources between Kotlin and Java quickstarts
• Keep build times reasonable (local and on Travis)
• Tools or interfaces or something to help us stay up to date and not let Java or Kotlin lag

[the-dagger]

@samtstern awesome, sounds great!
I would go with the following option :

Build Kotlin and Java together and insert a first screen in the app where the user decides to run either
the Kotlin or Java version

This will not only be much easier to implement, but we can also use interfaces like we did with snippets to ensure that the Kotlin/Java code snippets are always in sync with each other.
And as a bonus, we can also easily share resources among different activities.

The build times shouldn't be an issue imo!

@rosariopfernandes your thoughts?

[thatfiredev]

I think this

Create a whole new module for each quickstart in Kotlin. So auth and auth-kotlin

sounds good, but I'm afraid people might run into issues like this and not be able to fix it due to the large amount of modules in the project.

So I agree with @the-dagger . I think creating a first screen sounds like the best option.