Book Image

Simplifying Application Development with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

By : Róbert Nagy
Book Image

Simplifying Application Development with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

By: Róbert Nagy

Overview of this book

Sharing code between platforms can help developers gain a competitive edge, and Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) offers a sensible way to do it. KMM helps mobile teams share code between Android and iOS in a flexible way, leaving room for native development. The book begins by helping you to gain a clear understanding of the Kotlin Multiplatform approach, how it works, and how it is different from cross-platform technologies, such as React Native and Flutter, and code sharing options, such as C++. You'll then see how your team can use this software development kit (SDK) to build native applications more effectively by learning timeless concepts and working through practical examples. As you advance, you'll get to grips with the core concepts, understand why UI sharing fails, and get hands-on with developing a small KMM application. Finally, you'll discover expert tips and best practices, along with production- and adoption-related questions, that will help you take the next step in your project and career. By the end of this Kotlin book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of the capabilities of KMM and be able to share code between Android and iOS flexibly.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Getting Started with Multiplatform Mobile Development Using Kotlin
5
Section 2 - Code Sharing between Android and iOS
10
Section 3 - Supercharging Yourself for the Next Steps

Understanding Kotlin coroutines

Asynchronous programming is at the heart of mobile development. In order to write efficient applications, leveraging the async capabilities of the framework and language you are using makes all the difference.

Coroutines are my absolute favorite language feature of Kotlin because of their expressiveness and how easy it is to express your asynchronous development needs in a concise way.

In this section, we will be covering the basic concepts of coroutines and compare them to Swift's async/await and Combine patterns.

Suspend functions

Coroutines are basically suspendable tasks that can suspend and resume execution, and they are not bound to any particular thread.

When you're writing asynchronous code, you generally need to think about the following two things:

  • Which task needs asynchronous attention and has to be suspendable
  • How you combine asynchronous tasks with the rest of your code

Let's see how you...