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 the technical decisions

In this section, we're going to answer the following questions regarding the project:

  • What's our architecture of choice for Dogify?
  • Which pieces will we be sharing between the Android and iOS apps?
  • What libraries will we be using?

Architecture

Let's address the first question. As we discussed in Chapter 1, The Battle Between Native, Cross-Platform, and Multiplatform, the purpose of a multiplatform application is to share business, non-UI, or non-platform-specific logic between the different platforms. To make this happen, we need an architecture where the layers facilitate this; that is, where it's easy to divide non-UI layers from the UI layers, essentially.

Luckily, clean architecture suits this well, and we'll be implementing one version of it. You can read more about Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture here: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html.

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