I’ve started looking into JVM languages. As an exercise, I researched how to do a basic HTTP request - one trivial evaluation point of a language (i.e. how simply or comfortably this built-in feature is made available).
In Java, here’s one way to request a page:
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
URL url = new URL("http://example.com");
HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
// con.setRequestMethod("GET"); // this line is optional since GET is the default
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));
String inputLine;
StringBuffer content = new StringBuffer();
while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
content.append(inputLine);
}
in.close();
System.out.println(content);
con.disconnect();
}
}
The following is one way to do it in Kotlin:
import java.net.URL
fun main(){
println(URL("http://example.com").readText())
}
To be fair, I read that Kotlin was not built to be a “better Java” but I can see why some Java developers are interested in Kotlin.