Kongsberg Geospatial, an Ottawa-based developer of real-time, mission critical, geospatial and mapping software, announced today that its TerraLens geospatial platform has been updated to include integration with Microsoft’s Xamarin.
Xamarin is a cross-platform software development technology that allows developers to build applications in Microsoft’s C#.NET language, and then compile them to run on a variety of different operating systems like Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. The Xamarin software runs C# applications on a virtual machine style environment on different operating systems – resembling how Java applications work.
Now C# developers can add sophisticated geospatial and mapping capabilities to mobile applications for Android phones and tablets, simply by including the TerraLens libraries in their projects.
This new capability will also allow existing TerraLens developers to expand their platform support while continuing to use the popular Microsoft tools they used to develop their original applications.
“We believe that being able to easily include the mapping and display capabilities TerraLens provides in their applications will be a real benefit to C# developers,†explained Gilles Bessens, Technology Officer at Kongsberg Geospatial. “Even better, because the TerraLens API is designed to directly access hardware at a low level, developers will find that their Xamarin applications built with TerraLens don’t exhibit the slowdown typically seen with applications that run in a virtual machine. The performance bottlenecks typically found in virtual solutions is eliminated by using our direct access to hardware acceleration by leveraging OpenGL.â€
Performance with constrained hardware is a particular bugbear for Bessens and his product team: TerraLens was originally developed for defense applications which stipulated very strict performance requirements on low-power ARM chipsets. While the platform has continued to evolve new capabilities, the engineers at Kongsberg Geospatial have invested significant effort in maintaining that level of bare-metal performance. The result pays off in situations like application ports with Xamarin.
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