[xmlvm-users] Supporting native methods + Apache Harmony Java Runtime implementation

[Gergely K. <ger...@ma...>]

Hi,

We are porting a fairly complex J2ME / Android application to IPhone using
XMLVM, and I had an idea to speed up the process. Instead of implementing
every necessary class from the Java Runtime by hand, I pulled in the Apache
Harmony runtime implementation from the Android platform and got to the
point where it compiles to Java Bytecode. Now XMLVM happily produces
cross-compiled Objective C code from it, but of course there are a number of
native methods that need to be implemented. XMLVM treats native methods
simply as abstract methods.

The idea is to change the XSL, so it generates a dummy body for the native
methods, probably throwing an UnsupportedOperationException() or something
similar.
Then for those classes that are actually used by us, we can go ahead and
implement the native methods using the nice "Categories" feature of
Objective-C, without the need to touch the generated source code.

Of course, we plan to use the hand optimized versions of those classes that
are available. For low-level classes, like threads, we plan to implement the
Thread class directly using NSThread. But there are many classes, that are
seldom used (exceptions) or are only interfaces, or simply they are not yet
available in a hand optimized version. In these cases we are able to fall
back to the cross-compiled version.

What do you think?

Would you be interested in this solution?

Best Regards,
Gergely

-- 
Kis Gergely
MattaKis Consulting
Email: ger...@ma...
Web: http://www.mattakis.com
Phone: +36 70 408 1723