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InfoQ Homepage News Scade Aims to Enable Android App Development Using Swift

Scade Aims to Enable Android App Development Using Swift

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Cross Platform Swift provides the foundation for cross-platform iOS and Android app development using Swift. Its 2019 roadmap focuses on achieving feature completeness, improving productivity and usability, and enhancing communication with the Swift development community.

Made by Scade, Cross Platform Swift, currently at version 1.0, includes a Swift compiler targeting both ARM and X86 Android platforms, along with a Swift Foundation framework that is available for both iOS and Android. It also provides an Eclipse-based IDE, including a Visual UI designer and a Code Wizard to help developers get started with their projects, and a Scade simulator that runs on macOS.

For UI design, Scade leverages the power of SVG to create platform-independent interfaces that use native controls to preserve the platform native look and feel.

Our SCADE SDK provides cross platform access to the native controls (Text fields, keyboard, map, camera...) and allows using these control through one code base. The major functionality is exposed through one unified API, and for platform specific functionality you can cast the control to its native control class and use it without restrictions.

Cross Platform Swift has been in the workings for more than two years and, thanks also to Swift reaching ABI stability with Swift 5, is coming close to maturity, according to Scade.

With its latest release, indeed, Scade has been adding a few key components. Critical to enabling cross-platform development for iOS and Android using Swift is Fusion, a framework that makes it easy to call any Android functionality from Swift. Scade has also added support for Autolayout on Android, which makes it possible to use auto layout to create UIs on both platforms. Similarly, Cross Platform Swift is now able to use 3rd party frameworks, including native C libraries, CryptoSwift, SQLite, and others. SwiftUI support appears to be on Scade future roadmap as well.

Adding new features and improving developer productivity are not the only goals Scade is pursuing. In particular, Scade plans to strengthen its effort to provide full app samples and instructional content to help developers discover what the platform has to offer.

Cross Platform Swift Community edition can be downloaded for free from Scade website.

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