Programming Kotlin Applications. Бретт Мак-Лахлин

FIGURE 2.1 Your IDE should let you easily get to your source code as well as see output.

      WARNING If you get any warnings, the most likely culprit is that you didn't create your Person and PersonApp files in the same directory. Make sure both files are in the src/ directory and try again.

      At this point, you could go ahead and keep creating more objects in the src/ directory. But there's still a better way!

      Organize Your Classes with Packages

      While it's great that you've got Person separate from the test main function, you've still not really solved the original problem: class organization. If having all your classes in one file is a pain, then by extension, so is having all your classes in a single directory.

      What you really want is to organize your classes by functionality. So let's assume that you want your Person class, but you also think you might later want some specific types of people; maybe a Mother class or a Child class. Suppose you're building software to model a genealogy, for example.

In that situation, you really want your classes related to Person grouped together. But you might also have some classes related to the customer, with their account information: username, password, email. These aren't instances of Person, they're (perhaps) instances of a User. You might even have a UserPreferences class at some point, too, letting you store that user's information. So that might all belong to a group of classes related to User.

      Kotlin—and many other languages—use the concept of packages to provide this organization. A package is just a logical grouping of classes, with a particular namespace: some way to prefix and identify classes as being related. You could have a person package with Person, Mother, Father, and so forth, and a user package with User, UserPreferences, and the like.

      Naming your package is important, though, so a few best practices:

      Put all this together and separate the pieces with a dot delimiter (.). For this book, the package will usually be org.wiley.kotlin.[general category]. Person will be in org.wiley.kotlin.person and User will be in org.wiley.kotlin.user.

      NOTE You don't always have to have the last part of the package name (like person) match a class in that package (like Person). You might have an org.wiley.kotlin.sport package that has various sports-related classes like Football, Baseball, Hockey, and Volleyball, but not have an actual Sport class. It really depends on your own preferences and style.

      Put Person in a Package

With a package decided, you need to actually create this structure. Again, this is where an IDE can really make things simpler. If you're using IntelliJ, right-click your src/ folder and choose New and then Package. Type in the package name ( org.kotlin.wiley.person if you're following along, or use your own name), and you'll see a small package indicator created as part of your src/ tree.

      WARNING Each IDE handles this a bit differently, but the similarities are far greater than the differences. You can always just play around with the IDE to look for a New Package option (that's what I did when I was first learning Kotlin in IntelliJ), or check your IDE's documentation.

      If you're using the command line exclusively, it's a bit more of a pain. You'll need to create a directory structure to match your package structure, so you'd need an org/ directory, and then wiley/, then kotlin/, then person/, and then put your Person class there. You'll also need to work with the kotlinc compiler a bit more.

       You can find this documentation easily online, so to keep things moving, most of this book will assume you're either using an IDE or comfortable looking up how to compile files in packages on your own.

Now comes the “thank goodness for an IDE” part: just click your Person class in the left pane and drag it into the new package indicator. You'll get a dialog box that looks like Figure 2.2.

FIGURE 2.2 Moving a class to a new package is basically a refactoring, which your IDE can handle.

      This dialog will ensure that yes, you really do want to move the class into the indicated package. You can leave all these defaults, as IntelliJ is happy to do this work for you. When you're ready, click the Refactor button.

Now, your navigation pane (on the left in the IDE) should show Person under the new org.wiley.kotlin.person package, as shown in Figure 2.3.

      Before you think that too much magic has gone on, take a close look at the first line of your Person class, which is new:

      package org.wiley.kotlin.person

      That line tells Kotlin that the class belongs to the org.kotlin.wiley.person package. The compiled class then actually is org.kotlin.wiley.person.Person, not just Person.

      This is going to cause your main function to break, because that function doesn't know anything about org.kotlin.wiley.person.Person; and now there's no Person class.