Slashdot Mirror
Google's Android Cellphone SDK Released
AchiIIe writes "The android SDK has been released to the wild. As expected it features the Linux Kernel, low level libraries such as FreeType, OpenGL, SQL Lite, WebKit (as a web browser), a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU. A common java API is provided. A video has been posted with an the overview of the API." SM: Several readers have also written to mention the Android Developer Challenge offering $10 million in prizes for cool mobile apps.
The most common question I've heard is "What hardware is the Android platform running on?" Nobody outside of Google and possibly the Open Handset Alliance members has run it on hardware yet. If you're interested in trying to hack it, there is a board of people trying to get it on some phones: http://www.ohadev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15 ------------ Cheers, Brian Jordan http://ohadev.com/ - Android SDK code samples, tutorials, discussion
Shouldn't this point to the official repository at http://code.google.com/android/ instead of http://code.google.com/p/android, which just looks like some ad-hoc mirror?
Real slow phones.
No. Most of the phones on the market today use Java for graphics and applications, including pretty much all of the popular cell phones in Japan that make any phones in the Western world look childish by comparison. The problem is that there is an impression among standard Windows developers that Java is necessarily slow, which is absolutely not true. Sure, the early PC JVMs, the Swing toolkit and the applet model were resource-hungry abominations, but Java on cellphones is lean, mean, and it's already pretty much everywhere.
I just downloaded the SDK, so will hopefully have some time to play around with it. It looks potentially very interesting, but here are a few quick thoughts:
.. it's on the side so it doesn't get in the way, but it's there if you want it).
.. it will be interesting to see how it compares. I really like Cocoa. It's really a great language/libraries for developing windowed systems. Interface Builder is the only GUI builder I think makes sense. I hate code generation, and I hate the weird quirks that come with many others (QT, Visual Studios, WxWidgets, GLADE++). IB just works.
(1) It's Java. Sometimes Java is the right tool for the job. Unfortunately, I've never been a big fan of the Java libraries. They always seemed overly complex and verbose to do simple things. I say this comparing it to both the STL/Boost for C++ and Cocoa. Granted, both of those libraries have their issues.
(2) It's eclipse-centric. It looks like they want you to use Eclipse. I'm sure you can do fine without using Eclipse. I'm not sure how dependent it is on creating interfaces etc. So you might do best to ignore this point. Eclipse does some things really well -- taking advantage of being a Java-based editor, it can use RTTI to help in the code-writing process.
That said, I would be very happy if I never had to use Eclipse again. The interface itself is extremely non-intuitive, gets in the way, and caused a great deal of swearing to occur. Nowadays I use either Emacs, Textmate, or XCode. XCode isn't perfect but it does a really good job of not getting in your way, and occasionally actually helping out (like the reference panel that automatically calls up info on the function your cursor is over
(3) Code layout. I'm not sure how much of it being a Java thing, or how much it is google, but the fact that I need to go 3-4 directories in just to get to the source code is very frustrating. I'm pretty sure there's better ways to do that.
(4) I have an iPhone. I'm waiting for the iPhone SDK to be released
(5) It appears to come with an emulator, which is very cool! That is a major win for fast development times.
Give all my complaints, I'm probably going to try writing an app or two for it ASAP. Code should be fun to write, which will be my major test for how good/bad the platform is. I also wonder how configurable it is. Did they come up with good conventions? If not, can you override them, or will all apps suffer the same?
Yep - you have to pay a "license fee" of 10% of the potential prize to the government as a "permit" - even if nobody wins.
Of course, the simple way around that is to submit it via the web, naming a relative in another province/state.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I belive that should be SQLite (www.SQLite.org)
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Let me think about that for a sec...
.NET ES.
.NET ES is a bytecode interpreter platform for VB, C#, J#, etc.
:)
.NET and Java are pretty mixed when it comes to real world performance and memory usage. In a tiny app I wrote as an experiment in C#, I found .NET about 10% faster and 20% less memory efficient than the Java app it was based on. I've read .NET apps outperform java memory-wise in some real world conditions, as well as .NET having a problem with hitting memory bounds (and running very slow or crashing) much faster than java so as we say in the industry, YMWV. Both are generally about 10%-30% slower than C/C++, and both require memory tweaking by the programmer at times. For most mobile uses, this will be a non-issue - either is fast enough, and most apps won't put too much stress on available memory.
Windows Mobile is essentially Windows CE +
ergo, by postulate "Java means Real slow phones,"
Windows Mobile also means real slow phones.
Anyone have a problem with that?
Seriously, both