The desire for code re-use is a strong one among considerations of how to design a program or application. This competes with the desire to implement applications in their native, and oftentimes proprietary, framework.

Arguably the most important part of a mobile application to be developed natively is the view code. Non-native views on any sufficiently complex data-centered app are almost always immediately identified by users: web views and non-standard behavior almost always give it away. Furthermore, perhaps the least important part of an application to be native is the model. The storing, manipulation, and retrieval of data is oftentimes very similar across languages and frameworks: a linked-list is a linked-list no matter what language it’s in.

Perhaps we can use this dichotomy to best satisfy the competing desires of code re-use and native implementations: keep your views and controllers in native code, but implement your data model in shared code. Specifically, I’m wondering if I can move an application’s model to C++ on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone and only implement views and minimal controllers in native code.

In fact, ideally, all data-related tasks would be handy to have in shared code: anything involving databases, making requests to servers, and parsing responses are the taks which come to my mind. I think that in order to achieve this, I’m going to need to compile a framework for manipulating a database, a framework for making network connections, and a way to have native code request and receive data.

I think a design like this at least works, but it could even be desirable. Maybe the best way for me to find out would be to try it.