Building a REST Client with Kotlin and Retrofit2
If you regularly work with REST endpoints you're probably used to a lot of tedium. Between carefully constructing the parameters, encoding data in just the right format, efficiently sending the requests, parsing the results and handling errors at every step along the way; there is a lot of room to make mistakes. For simple APIs, it often makes sense to manually format the request and send it out. Checking a status code, and maybe mapping results to an object aren't that big a deal for a simple API. But what if there are 20 different endpoints? Or you need to manage authorization headers? Eventually, it makes sense to start looking for a wrapper library, or maybe making your own wrapper layer. That's what this post is about. For JVM developers, pairing Kotlin, Retrofit2 and Gson make it easy to bang out a type-safe client wrapper. Let us jump right into the code: // Create data classes for serializing inputs and outputs. data class Results ...