Xamarin : an overview

What is Xamarin

Xamarin is a software company that started in 2011. Microsoft recently acquired Xamarin in 2016. Xamarin provides a wide range of tools to the developer that can be used for the development of the cross-platform mobile application.

It is a framework to develop a cross-platform mobile application using the C#. There are various frameworks, which offer the ross-platform app development. They use HTML and JavaScript. With the help of this framework, we can develop apps like a website for a mobile app using JS libraries. The website is packed in a container which gives the feel of a native app.

Xamarin is different because it offers a single language C# and runtime, which works on three mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and Windows). Through Xamarin, we develop a mobile app whose look and feel is entirely native. In Xamarin, we write one C# codebase which has access to all the features of native SDK.

To download with Visual Studio, Xamarin tools are readily available. To use Xamarin on Windows, we need to install Visual Studio, which could be a free version or a premium license. After it, we need to configure it.

Features of Xamarin

• Xamarin supports wearable devices such as Android Wear and Apple Watch. The functionalities of these wearable devices in their native application are included by downloading the simple plugins from the XamarinCo Component Store.
• Popular Plugins are Cross-Platform, such as Text-to-speech and battery status. Platform-specific plugins too are available in Xamarin component store such as the Google Play billing support plugins.
• The Xamarin based cross-platform applications can easily be united to most of the popular backend platform such as Parse, Microsoft Azure, etc.
• Applications indexing in Xamarin allows those applications to be in search results, which are usually gets forgotten after a few uses from the users.

Working of Xamarin

Given below is the working:

• Commercial products are available from Xamarin.IOS: Xamarin.Android.
• The two are developed on Mono, the open source.net platform, based on the published ECMA standard. MONO runs on all possible platforms, including Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, and macOS, as the .NET system itself.
• It completely converted the iOS SDK and Android to C# so that the developer could become acquainted with it.
• Without the complexity of constantly learning syntactic languages, you can simply use the similarCodeBase for both the framework.
• And the UI is still the same. For the application, it has to be developed independently, then the shared codebase must be reduced.
• Below are both ways the user interface can be developed. First, using the original native approach to construct the user interface. The Xamarin. Forms are a further one. These types can be used to render the user interface for different platforms simultaneously and share the code 100% if you want Native UI technology.
• When the entire UI is done, the most chief move is the relation between the UI and the codebase.

Advantages of Xamarin

1) Fast App Development Cycle

The most crucial part of Xamarin App Development platform is that it contains the reusable code, 90% of which can be recycled for the development of apps on various platforms. The coding is based on C# language and .Net libraries. Since developers can reuse a great portion of original Xamarin codes for creating apps across different platforms. Due to simplified code sharing across different OS, Users have a shortened Product development lifecycle.

2) ative Applications

The solution for any application is native design. That is when Xamarin and its unique approach comes into existence. Xamarin Studio provides the advantage of Native UI, access to specific device features and most importantly, native performance. Sharing the code between the different platform is an easy task, which helps us to shorten the development lifecycle.

3)Shared App Logic

Apart from Native UI, the most powerful feature of Xamarin is shared, the app logic, which makes it is the most useful and most-usable cross-platform development tool. Application Logic underlying the UI layer like input validation, web service calls, database interactions, and backend enterprises integrations are coded once in C#. Developers can share 75% of the code across the various operating system. It saves the time to record in the applications, and there are fewer chances of the bugs.

4) API Integration

Xamarin binds the same APIs and UI controls which are used to build the iOS, Android, and Mac apps in their respective platform-specific language. For Windows development, Xamarin with Microsoft Visual Studio offers windows phone and windows applications. Code is shared between iOS, Android, and Windows using the Portable Class Library (PCL) and appropriate application architecture. With Xamarin, support is always there. These unique binding technologies enable us to to provide the support for the new feature as soon as they come in the device's operating system. Click on the respective platform links for their latest support packages for iOS 8 and Android L(with wearable support).

5) Xamarin Component Store

Xamarin believes in Collaboration and Component sharing. The developer chooses from the host free or paid component, which includes UI controls, cross-platform libraries, and third party web services to apps with just a few lines of code. The component store is built in the Xamarin Studio and Xamarin's Visual Studio extensions.

6) Advantages of C#

C# is a simple, modern, general-purpose, type-safe, pure object-oriented programming language. Being the object-oriented, it is the modern version of C++, which allows the simple data types as objects. The type safety of C# helps to prevent the type errors. Its simplified syntax allows the use of pointers and headers. Namespace and reference operator is replaced by the period. C# is a great programming language for cross-platform development.

Disadvantages of Xamarin

1) Unavoidable Software Overheads

Despite all the facts that Xamarin Mobile Application Development saves time by creating a single app for all the platform. On the other hand, it also involves in the linkage of the code and references between the target OS environment of different devices in use, and .Net frameworks show that this increases the time taken in the initiation and in downloading the apps.

2) Time-Consuming Nature of UI development

Time becomes an essential thing in UI development on the platform of Xamarin. Xamarin offers the facility to reuse the code across the target of the device platform. It is hard to create a portable version of the core UI. That is why Xamarin App Development experts thoroughly perform some portion of coding for an independent platform, which is a time-consuming process.

3) Issues of App file size

With consuming more time, Xamarin takes more space in storing the app file size because of the usage of the general use of Xamarin's core libraries and functionality of the app stores with the wrong app file size. The size margin in the store may range from 3MB to 15MB.

Conclusion

Xamarin is otherwise called the ruler of cross-stage application advancement. The rich highlights and coming about advantages of all focuses towards the cross-stage local applications. Notwithstanding the benefits of the Xamarin, it gloats up the steadily developing local area of 70,000 or more engineers who are persistently working together and upgrading the product.