Where Android Beats the iPhone

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner provides a developer's comparison of Android and the iPhone and finds Android not only competitive but in fact a better choice than the iPhone for many developers, largely due to its Java foundation. 'While iPhone developers have found that one path to success is playing to our baser instincts (until Apple shuts them down), a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket,' Wayner writes, pointing out GScript and Remote DB as two powerful tools for developers to make rough but workable custom tools for Android. But the real gem is Java: 'The pure Java foundation of Android will be one of the biggest attractions for many businesses with Java programmers on the staff. Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours. Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone — although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers.'"

Comments

Re:C? For programming C you should need a license!

[TheRaven64]

At least memory management in Java is easier.

Having seen memory leaks in every nontrivial Java program I've used (which, admittedly, is not many), I'm not certain about this. In C, memory management is hard, but that means that people think about it. In Java, memory management is implicit (which is not the same as easy), which means that people don't think about it. They don't think about the correct times to use weak references, and they end up leaking memory.

Java also has the distinction of being the language used for the only program I have ever seen with a CPU leak: Start it and watch the CPU usage slowly climb over the next few hours (while not actually doing anything, or taking any use input), until it's at 100% about 3 hours later.

Re:It's biggest strength

[Teufelsmuhle]

Thankfully it's now modded +5 Insightful, as it should be. Perfect balance and harmony has returned to slashdot.