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Google's Android Cellphone SDK Released
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Nov 12, 2007 02:23 PM
from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
AchiIIe writes "The android SDK has been released to the wild. As expected it features the Linux Kernel, low level libraries such as FreeType, OpenGL, SQL Lite, WebKit (as a web browser), a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU. A common java API is provided. A video has been posted with an the overview of the API." SM: Several readers have also written to mention the Android Developer Challenge offering $10 million in prizes for cool mobile apps.
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Android's "Non-Fragmentation Agreement" 142 comments
superglaze writes "The biggest doubt cast over Android (whose SDK was released yesterday) has been the fact that much of it is licensed under Apache. There have been worries that manufacturers might fork the code road in a non-interoperable kind of way. I.e., they would have no obligation to feed back code to the wider Open Handset Alliance, or even tell the other members what alterations have been made. However, it turns out that Google made all the members sign a 'non-fragmentation agreement' to make sure everything works with everything. In theory at least. 'All of the partners have signed a non-fragmentation agreement saying they won't modify [the code] in non-compatible ways ... That is not to say that a company that is not part of the OHA could not do so.' Google's spokesperson highlighted the historical dangers of working with Java, the programming language that lies at the heart of Android. 'One of the current problems with mobile Java development is that Java has fragmented ... Java virtual machines have fragmented, but all the members of the OHA have agreed to use one virtual machine that can run script in Java'"
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Coming Soon, Mobile Torrents 64 comments
explosivejared writes "ZDNet is running an article on the "mobile implementation of the bittorent protocol which says
'Mobile implementations of the BitTorrent protocol are nearly certain to be part of whatever Google Android comes up with, and if not someone will have one for the open platform straightaway. Already a Windows Torrent product is on Version 2.0, and given the video capability of the iPhone it's clear Apple is not going to let this opportunity pass by. A Symbian Torrent program is on Version 1.3."
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Hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
"a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU" - Kind of hard to do that in an emulator on a PC. What CPU is this optimized for? (Guessing ARM... Still, to evaluate performance you need real hardware.)
Re:Hardware? (Score:5, Interesting)
Android for Kaiser = drool. Even Android for Hermes would rock.
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Android is not on hardware yet (Score:5, Informative)
a COOL app (Score:4, Funny)
Incorrect repository URL? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Incorrect repository URL? (Score:5, Funny)
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Android will start the Java tornado on devices (Score:4, Interesting)
Being a developer of an open source java database [db4o.com] myself, I am absolutely thrilled.
This is the the single best possibe thing that could have happened for the success of Java on devices. This SDK will be decisive for how software will be written for the masses in the future: With Java. Don't forget: The number of mobile phone users without a PC will soon be an order of magnitude higher than the number of PC users.
Terr'rists, Italians and Quebecers not allowed. (Score:5, Interesting)
"The Android Developer Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, and business entities. While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions."
Mama Mia! Tabernak!
Re:Terr'rists, Italians and Quebecers not allowed. (Score:5, Informative)
Yep - you have to pay a "license fee" of 10% of the potential prize to the government as a "permit" - even if nobody wins.
Of course, the simple way around that is to submit it via the web, naming a relative in another province/state.
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Re:Terr'rists, Italians and Quebecers not allowed. (Score:5, Funny)
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worth a try.. (Score:5, Informative)
(1) It's Java. Sometimes Java is the right tool for the job. Unfortunately, I've never been a big fan of the Java libraries. They always seemed overly complex and verbose to do simple things. I say this comparing it to both the STL/Boost for C++ and Cocoa. Granted, both of those libraries have their issues.
(2) It's eclipse-centric. It looks like they want you to use Eclipse. I'm sure you can do fine without using Eclipse. I'm not sure how dependent it is on creating interfaces etc. So you might do best to ignore this point. Eclipse does some things really well -- taking advantage of being a Java-based editor, it can use RTTI to help in the code-writing process.
That said, I would be very happy if I never had to use Eclipse again. The interface itself is extremely non-intuitive, gets in the way, and caused a great deal of swearing to occur. Nowadays I use either Emacs, Textmate, or XCode. XCode isn't perfect but it does a really good job of not getting in your way, and occasionally actually helping out (like the reference panel that automatically calls up info on the function your cursor is over
(3) Code layout. I'm not sure how much of it being a Java thing, or how much it is google, but the fact that I need to go 3-4 directories in just to get to the source code is very frustrating. I'm pretty sure there's better ways to do that.
(4) I have an iPhone. I'm waiting for the iPhone SDK to be released
(5) It appears to come with an emulator, which is very cool! That is a major win for fast development times.
Give all my complaints, I'm probably going to try writing an app or two for it ASAP. Code should be fun to write, which will be my major test for how good/bad the platform is. I also wonder how configurable it is. Did they come up with good conventions? If not, can you override them, or will all apps suffer the same?
Re:worth a try.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some responses to your points:
(1) It's Java.
Java is the entrenched standard for mobile development. Google isn't pushing Java here, they're trying to maximize their reach to existing mobile developers.
(2) It's eclipse-centric.
As mentioned on their site, Google's developers use a mix of Eclipse, IntelliJ, and NetBeans for development, which is pretty much the standard in Java development. They've probably released an Eclipse plugin first because it had the broadest reach and perhaps it was the easiest environment to create a plugin for. I doubt this means that Google is pushing Eclipse, however, I would expect tutorials and documentation (if not additional plugins) to be released for the other environments soon enough.
(3) Code layout.
Code layout in package directories is pretty much a Java thing, again pretty standard.
(4) I have an iPhone.
iPhone is a single phone. Android will support a whole platform of upcoming phones. This is a big enough difference to be interested in the Android SDK at the very least, if not both. Plus, you can check out the Android SDK now while you'll have to wait until February for teh iPhone SDK.
(5) It appears to come with an emulator, which is very cool!
Yeah, it is very cool! This is also pretty standard for wireless toolkits (WTK), since development on the devices themselves is usually difficult and time-consuming. My company's [javaground.com] suite of game development tools includes a similar universal emulator, which I love using. It's pretty much a must for mobile development.
I'm also looking very forward to playing around with the SDK. Hope some great things can come from these developments in the mobile world.
-Will [ohadev.com]
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WebKit? (Score:5, Insightful)
That means that the gPhone web browser has the same rendering engine as the iPhone web browser, the one that's shared by Safari (and OmniWeb) on the desktop. It's going to get less and less safe for web developers to ignore that rendering engine...
Re:WebKit? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:WebKit? (Score:5, Informative)
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So, were all the nay-sayers now? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know who you are, the ones that said Ballmer had a point last week when he called Android a press-release. Well, here is the SDK, as promised. On time.
So will all those slashdotter who doubted eat crow now? Or will the MS fanboys just pretend this never happened, or now move on to, "all google has is a press-release, and a sdk, and an alliance".
Come on, we need some amusement here. Spin this one!
Webkit as a powerful new platform (Score:5, Insightful)
So... Java... standard APIs... WebKit... (Score:4, Interesting)
That would mean that you could code for the gPhone and deploy on the iPhone (or even iPod Touch), either by loading the runtime onto the iPhone first (cf. "Cedega"), or by bundling a stripped-down runtime into the iPhone version of the app (cf. "Cider").
That'd rock. That'd rock hard. I'd become an Android developer if things work out that way.
This cannot be true! (Score:5, Funny)
No it hasn't. THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! IT'S JUST VAPORWARE! IT'S JUST A PLAN ON PAPER! THERE'S NOTHING BEHIND IT, NO SPECS, NO DETAILS!
I'm 100% sure this is the case because Steve Ballmer said so. All claims to the contrary must therefore be lies.
Re:Java means (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be suicide (see Palm as an example) for Google to make developing using native code difficult. (For those not in the know, even though PalmOS has run on ARM CPUs for years, normal apps are still emulated m68k code, with the option of "ARMlets" to allow snippets of native code on PalmOS 5. Writing an ARMlet is an UNHOLY NIGHTMARE. I attempted to speed up a program by replacing some code with native ARM code and gave up.)
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Re:Java means (Score:5, Interesting)
PalmOS primarily ran on low power devices, and you pretty much needed to "hit the metal" if you wanted to get any sort of performance from your apps. It's something I used to do a great deal in the past, but not for many years.
However, we're talking about much more powerful devices here. Even the most basic smart phone packs quite a bit of processing power these days, and much of the core functionality is provided at a hardware level, so the level of abstraction provided by a driver model is absolutely essential. If you go low level, then your application isn't able to take advantage of the additional power offered by some devices but not others. You end up coding to the lowest common feature-set.
Making use of the APIs which provide interoperability and a standardised framework is the only way to ensure that your software will run on all Android devices, something which from a business point of view is essential.
For what it's worth, I was always a big fan of Palm's work back in the day, but they really haven't moved with the times, and I genuinely can't see them surviving for long now that Google have put together what, certainly at first inspection, appears to be a very fine, well thought out, free mobile platform and application stack, especially as they are also providing all of the necessary tools and support for free.
I know I'll certainly be putting in the time to fully learn the APIs and try and come up with novel commercial ideas for a chance to get hold of some of the $10M cash their putting up to get as many people involved as possible. I suspect many others will be doing the same.
With a company the size of Google behind the software, and interest from plenty of big players on the hardware front, coupled with sensible Open Source choices when it comes to the main platform components, I can't see it being anything other than a success.
Whilst it's currently being marketed as a smart phone platform, Android easily has the potential to spur on the creation the sort of non-mobile convergence devices that we've been expecting for years, but which have failed to materialise. If you look at the functionality provided by the platform, it's more than capable of providing all of most people's day to day requirements of a full PC, and not just a mobile device. If you ignore gaming, which has always been the driving force behind the push for faster hardware, then most users only require a small fraction of the processing power available in their desktop PC, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if within the year we didn't have full desktop oriented devices based around Android on the market.
As you can probably tell, I think Google have done pretty much everything right as far as Android is concerned, and I'm very excited about it. I fully expect the smart money and development talent to be behind them, if not from the very start, then very soon.
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Re:Ooops (Score:5, Insightful)
Going with a JVM is the only logical way to go with this kind of system. You don't want the end user to have to compile the application for their phone and yow don't want to have recompile a for each new cell phone that hits the market.
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Java is not bad for mobile phones. (Score:5, Informative)
Real slow phones.
No. Most of the phones on the market today use Java for graphics and applications, including pretty much all of the popular cell phones in Japan that make any phones in the Western world look childish by comparison. The problem is that there is an impression among standard Windows developers that Java is necessarily slow, which is absolutely not true. Sure, the early PC JVMs, the Swing toolkit and the applet model were resource-hungry abominations, but Java on cellphones is lean, mean, and it's already pretty much everywhere.
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Re:How will Google make money on this? (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be worth it for them just by making it hook in easily with Google ads and search.
Think about it this way: as mobile phones become more powerful and internet-ready, more people will be doing more of their casual online stuff on their phones. Right now, lots of smartphones are defaulting to Windows for their development. That means their web browsers will probably use Live search for their search engine. Phones will recommend Hotmail for anyone looking for webmail. It will become a good way for Microsoft to fight Google for online dominance.
So what's Google's way to fight back? Apple's keeping the iPhone software to themselves. Palm is basically a joke. RIM's stuff is pretty limited. Google has to build their own platform so that Nokia and Motorola will be using Google Search, Gmail, Google Apps, Blogger, etc. as a default.
So that's where the money is. That's where all Google's money comes from.
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Re:Random? (Score:5, Interesting)
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