We showcase the Independent Parallel Particle Layer (IPPL), a performance portable C++ library for particle-in-cell methods. IPPL makes use of Kokkos (a performance portability abstraction layer), HeFFTe (a library for large scale FFTs), and MPI (Message Passing Interface) to deliver a portable, massively parallel toolkit for particle-mesh methods. IPPL supports simulations in one to six dimensions, mixed precision, and asynchronous execution in different execution spaces (e.g. CPUs and GPUs). One of the advantages of such a framework is the ability to be a test-bed for new algorithms which seek to improve runtime and efficiency of large scale simulations, for example in the beam and plasma physics communities. More concretely, we showcase the performance and usability of our library using a set of plasma physics mini-apps, collectively known as ALPINE, as well as a cosmological structure formation mini-app. Performance is shown on multiple architectures, such as the Nvidia Grace Hopper GPUs (GH200) and Nvidia A100 GPUs.