Historically the words “Dagger” and “painless” have been mutually exclusive. Dagger has often been associated with complex configuration. Subsequent alternative Kotlin based frameworks have popped up with slogans: “Painless Kotlin Dependency Injection” and “A pragmatic lightweight dependency injection framework for Kotlin developers”. Unfortunately, there is no free lunch and the alternative Kotlin based solutions introduce a different set of tradeoffs such as compile time safety and runtime performance. Why can’t we have our cake and eat it too?

In this article, we will evaluate a simple Kotlin, Android, Dagger app minus the boilerplate and magic. Unfortunately, the official documentation is…

A typical web-based desktop app will be rendered in a browser such as Google Chrome on a desktop or laptop. Every user request or screen will result in an associated REST call to the server, and the associated JSON will be retrieved and transformed into a screen update. For example, when a user loads a todo app, the server will issue a GET request to todo/list which will return a JSON array. If the user requests the todo detail another request to /todo/{id} will be issued.

A typical mobile app works very similar to a typical web app, where each…

Mobile development has historically required development on 2 or more distinct platforms and toolkits

• iOS: (Objective C, Swift, Xcode)
• Android: (Java, Kotlin, Android Studio)

Abstracting logic and sharing common code that is reused for different purposes is not a new concept, it is the history of modern computing. By comparison, iOS and Android are just over 10 years old and still in its infancy.

Why we need a cross platform solution

Both iOS and Android platforms are sufficiently complex that it takes years for engineers to be considered experts in a single platform. Mastering each platform requires knowledge of 2 officially supported programming languages, knowledge of the…

In the following we will show you how to setup a basic iOS and Android Kotlin Native project to demonstrate the following functionalities:

• View: Android and IOS shared code using Kotlin Native Common module
• MVP: platform specific View implementation, common Presenter
• Multi threading via Coroutines
• HTTP via Ktor client
• JSON serialization via kotlinx.serialization
• Dependency Injection via Kodein
• Logging via platform specific APIs

We will build a minimal working prototype to connect to a usplash API download a file and display the image. …