Android… what J2ME should have been

Google released Android today, the Java SDK that people have been calling the gPhone… and wow! It’s what J2ME should have been, or at least what it should have turned into.

For a start, it has Java 5 language features such as generics and annotations… features that help the developer but add no additional burden at runtime. And it’s open! Besides testing and certification, the biggest problems with J2ME is not the quirks on individual handsets but the lack of an open source community. If you want to write anything in J2ME, you’re on your own. Even hunting down the Javadocs for some standard libraries is a mission in itself, never mind finding actual code! With Android, expect libraries to appear to do anything you could ever want to do.

I’ve only started looking at the way applications are written, but it seems that the layout is all defined in an XML format and the programming side happens in pure Java land. This seems like a fantastic way to do things as it lets the designers get on with their job unhindered by the programming logic… our good friend Bryan Rieger has been convinced of this as a way to write MIDlets for a long time now.

And it has webkit support for browsing the web!

And it is a single download with an Eclipse plugin! (Works on Windows, Linux and Apple… name one J2ME dev kit that works like that).

And it has a Google Data API and Google Android Maps API. Although, be careful with the licensing (note that the svn tree is not uploaded yet), as not all of it is under the Apache licence yet.

The best part is, it’s all in Java… so download the SDK, read the documentation and start programming to claim your portion of that $10 million.

I just want to know when I can get this running on my RAZR V3i instead of the absolutely useless software that it ships with. Welcome to the world of tomorrow! And to think I began the day wanting an iPhone (although, it has been a true inspiration for Android, lets be honest… especially with that Apple Dock™).

Update: apparently Android is not really Java, the JVM is different.