Saturday, February 14, 2009

More Exciting Updates on Mono/Android

Looks like Koushik Dutta has been kicking butt getting Mono onto Google's Android platform:

Keep up the awesome hacking, Koushik!

Also of interest is his article on why JNI sucks compared to doing the same thing in .NET: JNI in Android (and a foreword about why JNI sucks)

I never actually used JNI back when I was doing Java development in school, so when people told me it sucked I just took their word for it, but always wondered just how bad it was. Now I know. All I can say is: Ugh.

Hopefully the Java community replaces JNI with something as clean and elegant as what we find in .NET.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Erm, JNA is a lot less horrible : https://jna.dev.java.net/
Would probably need work for Dalvik..

And Javalution Struct & Union classes are great for accessing C allocated bits of memory or binary dumped files painlessly:
http://javolution.org/api/javolution/io/Struct.html

Jeffrey Stedfast said...

So... after fighting tooth and nail against Microsoft's J/Invoke, Sun eventually caved and implemented P/Invoke for Java and called it JNA.

Anonymous said...

JNA was produced by community members, sadly it is not part of Java yet.

They are still fighting good ideas. Probably because it was not invented by them.

Jeffrey Stedfast said...

...And people wonder why there's a need for Mono ;-)

Seriously though, Java could be a much better platform than it is today if they would just relax their control over it a bit and allow the good ideas in. But Sun just keep disappointing over and over :-(

Have they even released JavFX for Linux or Solaris yet?

Anonymous said...

The runtime should work on Linux and Solaris. It is only the SDK that is missing.

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