Sounds like the title of a B-Grade movie? Rest assured, it’s not. In fact, it could be the biggest thing to hit the mobile software ecosystem. It’s no secret that to code for mobile devices, there’s no Java equivalent in terms of portability. In the general computing environment, at least the JVM has managed to abstract away a lot of the OS (there are still issues with databases and file systems but good programming practices generally takes care of these as well). Java ME is heavily fragmented, is poorly featured and though it carries the Java moniker, the code can be different and the libraries certainly are.
Last week Google announced Android which is an open-source (so they claim) OS stack for mobile phones. What’s cool about this is that along with the announcement, we are told of Dalvik, an VM that takes in Java bytecode (well, another tool converts bytecodes to Dalvik-compatible code to be precise). What this means is that Google has just allowed the millions of Java developers worldwide to code for Android. What a brilliant move. I’ve been wanting to code for mobile devices for so long, but I’m not keen in learning C nor do I wish to resort to .NET (the IDE costs a bomb). I want Java. Not the J2ME variant which are so littered with different profiles to worry about you are practically coding for multiple devices! Google already has an SDK available which comes with an emulator, a couple of libraries and compilers. It also has an Eclipse plugin which effectively allows you to code, debug and run your code from Eclipse. In short, Google in one fell swoop did what Palm and Symbian could not do - offer a solid development platform for free. And I can code it using Java. Wonderful.
What’s even more interesting than the release itself? Why the buzz and speculation about Android/Dalvik of course. See here.
