News

SCADE Update Furthers Mobile Cross-Platform Swift Programming

• By David Ramel
• August 9, 2019

SCADE, described as a next-generation mobile application development platform that allows Apple's open source Swift programming language to be used for Android apps in addition to iOS, now supports Swift 5 thanks to an update.

Scade Ltd. announced SCADE 0.9.16.0 last week, with additional functionality such as modal dialogs and several other improvements, along with Swift 5 support.

SCADE lets developers code with Swift and then produce machine code for either iOS apps or Android (ARM/x86) apps via the Apple Swift compiler.

In describing how SCADE works, the company said: "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."

SCADE supports these platforms:

• OSX using the SCADE simulator
• iOS simulator and binary (ipk)
• Android Simulator ARM & x86
• Android ARM & x86 binary (both 32bit and 64bit) (apk)

The company outlined the plans for its young platform to further cross-platform app development with Swift in a June post, saying that this year it will focus on:

• Achieving feature completeness: keeping up with the Swift standard, working on other basic capabilities with its own Fusion framework (for invoking Android functionality via Swift) and third-party frameworks and so on.
• Productivity and usability: After having introducing Autolayout for Android, the team said it will try to make its wares more user friendly via a page editor overhaul and more.
• Communication and knowledge transfer: The team will publish two complete developer app tutorials (beginner and advanced level), weekly smaller "how to" articles to demonstrate how to solve smaller problems, and complete SDK documentation. "Moreover, we will start a technical article series on Fusion and Swift foundation to make people realize that identical Swift mobile app code can be used to build for Android and iOS."

While the young project hasn't hit version 1.0 yet, it does have some examples of cross-platform Android/iOS projects powered by Swift on GitHub.