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Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by personZ on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @09:38AM (#7591699)
Rubin came from Danger, which was a J2ME company. They started Android (pre-Google) as yet another J2ME company. When they were eventually acquired by Google, Google didn't want to play ball with Sun, so they went with a clean-room simile, but, to consult actual Google documentation (three years after Android was started)-

http://www.scribd.com/doc/217988654/13/Boot-Loader

the Platform will be compatible with Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME).

Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by mdwrigh2 on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @11:48AM (#7592432)
But they didn't intend to build a J2ME platform, but rather a shim for J2ME apps via some compatibility mode. From some of the original Google documentation:

> "Leverage Java for its existing base of developers. Build a useful app framework (not J2ME). Support J2ME apps in compatibility mode. Provide an opTMobileized JVM (Dalvik)," one slide reads.

I think there's a pretty big difference between building a platform on top of something, and planning to support it via a shim layer. At that point Android was already planning on breaking from J2ME by supporting things like JNI (which is listed on that doc but is explicitly not included in a conforming CLDC implementation for security reasons).

Besides, the only microedition APIs that are in the platform are a few khronos libs, so I really don't think any of that thought really affected Android as we know it today (which was the parents original argument). I will give you that there's more JavaME heritage than I thought, but it was thrown out pretty quickly as far as I can tell.