This project pretends to be a research project to play around with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) and discover its benefits and drawbacks. Read this Medium article if you want to know more about this project.
The KMM project structure is compound by three main blocks or folders.
The androidApp folder contains the Android application. It is a regular Android Project, built with Gradle, which you can play around with Android Studio IDE.
The iosApp folder contains the iOS application. It is a regular iOS app that can be opened and run with Xcode.
The shared folder contains the shared Kotlin code that will be consumed by the applications explained above. This is where the magic takes place and the core keys to be considered are the following.
This folder hosts the actual common code, which is supposed to be totally independent from the platform and totally interchangeable.
This folder contains the code dependent from the Android Platform. It provides the actual implementation for the expected declaration in commonMain. For instance, it can be used to retrieve the device information, which implementation is different for each platform. The actual Android implementation would be android.os.Build.VERSION.BASE_OS to retrieve the Operating system version.
This folder contains the code dependent from the iOS Platform. It provides the actual implementation for the expected declaration in commonMain. For instance, it can be used to retrieve the device information, which implementation is different for each platform. The actual iOS implementation would be UIDevice.currentDevice.systemName() to retrieve the Operating system version.
The sample concept was creating a simple validation library. The most common scenario is an Android and iOS application which have a random form that the user must fulfil to get some action done. This validations may include email, phone number, email, bank account, name, surname, etc.
Usually the validation logic would have to be duplicated, case by case, for both platforms, which is quite error prone and expensive in terms of time invested.
If only we could write this code only once... Well, this is where KMM comes to the rescue so we can write, in a very friendly programming language (Kotlin), a single library that can be reused by both Android and iOS applications. Actually this library could also be used by a Java Script frontend application. Actually... this library could also be used as a backend validation library (if we had a Java backend application) so that with a single base of code we could implement the validation for the frontend (iOS, Android, Web React) and backend (Java Spring). Of course, this depends on your stack implementation.
Copyright 2021 Javier Martínez
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