Re:J2objc - A Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and r...
by cromwellian on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:32PM
(#4519423)
It's not really for writing the front-end UI logic in Java, you can use MonoTouch for that. The PlayN library (code.google.com/p/playn) uses MonoTouch+IKVM to run Java code on IOS.
The goal for this is that a company like Google which has millions of lines of Java code, shared on the server, on Android, on the Web (via GWT). The best way to optimize UI is to use the native Widget set and language features since you often have to rewrite the UI for each device anyway.
However, the non-UI layers could be shared, and it is a non-trivial win. For example, products like Google Docs use Operational Transforms. We have a library that implements this in Java, and rather than maintain three separate versions (Java, JS, and Objective-C), we can keep one version of the library for three platforms.
If you consider the feature lag between Web GDrive, Android GDrive, and iOS GDrive, think about how problems of maintaining three different spreadsheet implementations and keeping them in sync. Tools like this can help.
The goal for this is that a company like Google which has millions of lines of Java code, shared on the server, on Android, on the Web (via GWT). The best way to optimize UI is to use the native Widget set and language features since you often have to rewrite the UI for each device anyway.
However, the non-UI layers could be shared, and it is a non-trivial win. For example, products like Google Docs use Operational Transforms. We have a library that implements this in Java, and rather than maintain three separate versions (Java, JS, and Objective-C), we can keep one version of the library for three platforms.
If you consider the feature lag between Web GDrive, Android GDrive, and iOS GDrive, think about how problems of maintaining three different spreadsheet implementations and keeping them in sync. Tools like this can help.