To be honest, the project was pretty basic, but I had a lot of fun designing something from the ground up with in a multidisciplinary team.įast forward to today, and you’ll find that not much has change-at least not until recently. The Arduino had a Bluetooth attachment which we used to communicate with the lock through an Android mobile app. Regardless, I hadn’t had much experience with anything beyond those languages, so I went the Android route to leverage my Java experience.įor those who are curious, we used an Arduino to drive a solenoid lock. For the record, that was the expected repetoire for someone pursuing a Computer Engineering degree. Īt the time, I was only familiar with Java, C, Verilog, and x86. In fact, my one and only experience with it was my last semester of undergrad in 2016 when I built an Android app to interact with a smart lock. We can achieve this by simply extending the Java Optional class as follows: fun Optional.toNullable(): T? = this.My relationship with mobile app development has been rather brief.

Ideally this should be available on any Java Optional object (in our project only).

So all I need is a simple piece of code that converts a Java Optional into a Kotlin Nullable. They enable us to add functionality to classes that we cannot change or subclass, for example as it is final. I already knew the concept of extensions from Swift and found that Kotlin also supports extensions. Since we are implementing in Kotlin we would like to use Kotlin Nullables instead and as it turned out we can achieve this very easily. Using this API out of the box would force us to deal with cumbersome Java Optionals. This library is written in Java, hence method signatures look like this: Optional findById(ID var1)

We are using a CrudRepository that provides basic functionalities like save(), delete(), findById() etc. This includes Spring Boot Jpa Repositories. We are using Kotlin and Spring Boot in one of our projects.

Nullable kotlin