Embracing Stable Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) with Koin: Your Comprehensive Integration Guide (with Cheat Sheet)

Last week, JetBrains made an electrifying announcement, proclaiming Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) as stable.

This remarkable achievement not only signifies a major milestone for the Kotlin development community but also instills a renewed sense of confidence and dependability for developers utilizing Kotlin's capabilities across various platforms.

As KMP's ecosystem continues to expand, Koin emerges as an essential Kotlin-centric framework for dependency injection, guaranteeing that your multiplatform code is not only shared but also immaculately structured. This open-source powerhouse enables you to share logic across various platforms while preserving the integrity and performance of native applications. 

Understanding Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP)?

KMP, a powerful component of the Kotlin programming language, offers you the remarkable ability to write your application code only once and effortlessly share it across multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, web, and desktop. This groundbreaking concept is revolutionizing the app development landscape. With KMP, your shared codebase is cleverly compiled into native binaries, ensuring that the final application preserves the exceptional speed and efficiency typically associated with apps written in a native language for each specific platform.

Image by JetBrains

Koin: The Cohesive Glue for Your KMP Projects

Koin is a lightweight dependency injection framework tailored for Kotlin developers. It harmonizes with KMP's stable features to facilitate seamless integration across platforms. As we bask in the glory of KMP's newfound stability, Koin offers a bridge that binds the common logic with platform-specific implementations.

Getting Started with Koin in Your KMP Project

With KMP achieving stability, it's the perfect time to integrate Koin into your development workflow. Here's how:

Begin by including the koin-core or koin-test Gradle dependencies in your project to access Koin's robust set of DI tools.

To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your project, you can seamlessly integrate Koin annotations using Google's Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP) guide. This integration improves compile-time correctness and significantly speeds up your build times.

Once you have incorporated the Google KSP plugin into your project, you can effortlessly add the koin-annotations and koin-ksp-compiler dependencies to your Kotlin Multiplatform project. For a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this, refer to this informative guide.

Crafting Shared Code with Koin

In the world of KMP, shared code is the heartbeat of your application. Koin simplifies dependency management within this shared codebase, allowing you to define your dependencies succinctly with single, factory, and scoped constructs. This clarity ensures that your singletons, new instances, or context-bound services are effortlessly managed and ready for use.

Platform-Specific Modules with Koin

For JVM-specific implementations, Koin modules provide an uncomplicated method to declare how your dependencies should be constructed and interacted with, preserving the consistency and reliability that the recent KMP stable release promises.

In the world of iOS, by utilizing the power of the actual keyword, you can seamlessly implement platform-specific variations of your anticipated declarations. This ensures that your iOS applications can take advantage of the same cutting-edge dependency injection strategies as their Android counterparts, promoting consistency and unity across platforms.

Synchronizing Common and Native Code

You can seamlessly call upon native modules from shared code, resulting in a harmonious interplay between the common and platform-specific elements of your application.

Integrating Koin with Swift

With Koin's pragmatic approach, you can easily wrap Koin dependencies, making them accessible within your Swift code. This integration exemplifies how Koin not only respects but also enhances the boundaries of the Kotlin ecosystem.

Leveraging ViewModel with Koin

KMM-ViewModel provides a consistent ViewModel layer that works in harmony across Android and iOS. This unification brings predictability to your app's behavior on any platform. Koin helps to integrate them.

iOS Specifics in Koin

Handling iOS-specific dependencies like NSUserDefaults is more straightforward with Koin. By conforming to KMP libraries and utilizing Koin's initialization processes, you ensure that native settings are seamlessly available to your Kotlin code.

Wrapping UP