Codename One, Cross Platform "Native" Development

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/codename-one-cross-platform-native-development/

“Java is dead”

“dotNET killed Java”

are phrases I hear a lot these days. But is it true? Is Java really dead?

When compared to other languages like JavaScript, Python or Ruby, Java has a much steeper learning curve.

One does not simply kill the language of choice of 9 million devs. One does not simply kill the base language of Android. And finally, one does not simply kill The cross-mobile platform language.

Java on every mobile… wait, what?

Codename One is a way of creating native mobile applications for Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, using the same Java source code. Android native apps use Java, but iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone do not. The truth is, Codename One makes translations of your Java code into the native code for each of these platforms, sometimes resulting in faster apps than the native versions.

Read more on SitePoint…

The Codename One landing page has a very strange typographic error.

Codename One powers more than 50MM devices;

I have never heard of a 50 millimeter mobile device!

It’s not widely used everywhere, but MM is shorthand for “million” (and M for “thousand”)

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Ha yes! Or 50 2000 devices if you’re roman inclined…

O well, even if they can claim that “MM” is proper usage (albeit weird), they shouldn’t have added an apostrophe to “Fortune 500’s”. :stuck_out_tongue:

Spot On, Ralph.
I have become increasingly annoyed and increasingly disturbed by an increasing proliferation of incorrectly applied apostrophes!

So what did everyone think of the technology? :wink:

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Codename One has the performance that a hybrid app cannot have.
There is no 300ms delay with native apps.

https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick There you go :smirk:

Creating apps with CSS and JavaScript can be difficult to debug, many of these issues wouldn’t happen developing with Codename On

Sure, transcompiling the java to objective-c then compiling it into an app using a cloud service, then reloading the entire thing in a simulator sounds so much easier.

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