Native libraries

In spite of the fact that the Xamarin framework and .NET core implementations on Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS platforms provide a vast amount of features, in some cases it is unavoidable to include native code in cross-platform implementations. Fortunately, it is possible to bind or link native libraries on both of these platforms.

Managed callable wrappers (Android)

As mentioned in previous chapters, managed callable wrappers are generated managed code libraries which provide a way to interact with the Java Runtime over the JNI bridge to execute code from certain Java libraries.

Java libraries are often packaged in Java archive files (JAR files) and it is possible, using the compiled Java library project, to create a binding library which can be included in Xamarin.Android applications.

In order to demonstrate this usage, we will be creating a MCW for a simple JSON parsing library. The first step of creating our binding library would be to use the built-in project template...