Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

By : Can Bilgin
Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

By: Can Bilgin

Overview of this book

The main goal of this book is to equip you with the required know-how to successfully analyze, develop, and manage Xamarin cross-platform projects using the most efficient, robust, and scalable implementation patterns. This book starts with general topics such as memory management, asynchronous programming, local storage, and networking, and later moves onto platform-specific features. During this transition, you will learn about key tools to leverage the patterns described, as well as advanced implementation strategies and features. The book also presents User Interface design and implementation concepts on Android and iOS platforms from a Xamarin and cross-platform perspective, with the goal to create a consistent but native UI experience. Finally, we show you the toolset for application lifecycle management to help you prepare the development pipeline to manage and see cross-platform projects through to public or private release.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Web services


A web service is generally defined as an interoperable machine-to-machine communication over the wire (network). In the context of cross-platform application, the most important term in this definition would be "interoperable". Web services written in different frameworks or languages and running on different type of runtimes and hardware conform to the same standards, most of which can be consumed by applications running on a variety of platforms, including Xamarin target platforms.

Xamarin target platforms, namely iOS and Android, and Windows Runtime, can access stateless web services using the TCP/IP (short for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) stack over a secure or non-secure HTTP (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol) transport layer. Even though various data representations can be consumed via web services, JSON and XML are the most common text-based notations used.

Note

While defining or accessing a web service, there are three basic elements that need...