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Xamarin Team Documents How to Bind Kotlin Libraries
Shortly after detailing new guidance to bind Swift libraries in Xamarin-based iOS mobile development, Microsoft has published similar documentation for binding Kotlin libraries in Android projects.
Both Kotlin and Swift are relatively new programming languages that have taken their respective ecosystems by storm: Swift as a replacement for Objective-C in iOS development and Kotlin as a replacement for Java in Android development. With their growing popularity, the team responsible for C#-based Xamarin is accommodating developers who want to use libraries for either in Microsoft's cross-platform mobile scheme.
"The ability to reuse components built with Kotlin has become increasingly important to Xamarin developers as their popularity amongst developers continues to grow," said Alexey Strakh of Microsoft's Mobile Customer Advisory Team in a March 9 blog post. "You may already be familiar with the process of binding regular Java libraries. Additional documentation is now available describing the process of Binding a Kotlin Library, so they are consumable by a Xamarin application in the same manner."
Strakh goes on to provide a high-level view of how that works in four primary steps:
- Building the native library
- Preparing the Xamarin metadata which enables Xamarin tooling to generate C# classes
- Building a Xamarin Binding Library using the native library and the metadata
- Consuming the Xamarin Binding Library in a Xamarin application
Xamarin developers who want to learn more of nitty-gritty low-level steps can consult the Xamarin Kotlin Binding Walkthrough documentation.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.