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

Tying the Android app to the shared code

We'll be using a simple ViewModel pattern to interact with the shared code and expose the needed data and actions to our UI, based on Android's architecture ViewModel to leverage some life cycle functionality provided by the framework.

We'll create a simple MainViewModel class in the androidApp module. Let's go through the implementation step by step.

First, let's think about what dependencies this ViewModel has:

class MainViewModel(
    breedsRepository: BreedsRepository,
    private val getBreeds: GetBreedsUseCase,
    private val fetchBreeds: FetchBreedsUseCase,
    private val onToggleFavouriteState:
      ToggleFavouriteStateUseCase
 ) : ViewModel() {

Since we'll be communicating with the shared code, we'll make use of the three use cases for running the specific actions, and we&apos...