Re: [xmlvm-users] Howdy

[Sascha H. <sa...@gm...>]

Hi Michael!

Welcome to the list! :) See comments inline:

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Michael McGlothlin <mo...@gm...>wrote:

> New to XMLVM and the list. It sounds like an interesting project. I've
> been teaching myself Android and iPhone programming for about a year
> in my spare time.
>
> Have you considered making Flash transcode to XMLVM? I don't do much
> with it but that'd open doors to Android and iPhone for many
> developers I think.
>

Flash is not on our list of things to support. And as Flash is coming to
Android soon, I don't think this is something worth considering. It would be
a huge amount of work that would probably take many years to support
something like Flash for us.


>
> I was also thinking this somewhat applies to the new HipHop PHP to C++
> translator. Maybe seeing what they did could help improve the C++
> support and add PHP as an input language.
>

I don't see how PHP would be an interesting input language for creating
standalone mobile apps. PHP is a server-side technology. If you develop a
web-app nowadays  you can create JS-based apps that make use of
offline-storage (HTML5/Gears) that will run on your phone, even if it is not
online. PHP doesn't have the necessary APIs to be used for dynamic
client-side code, I think. But I might be wrong. But in any way, we are not
planning to support PHP in XMLVM ourselves.


>
> Any custom languages created for this yet? Seems ideal for a game
> oriented language like Zillions or Game Creator.
>

I don't know these two in detail but have heard of them. In general I would
say, that such APIs/languages are an interesting target, but I would need to
see them in detail to determine whether they are a good fit with
Android/iPhone.

One thing to keep in mind with all of the things you mentioned above: There
are always two things you need to do in order to allow cross-compilation of
apps: First thing is the cross-compilation of the actual logic/instructions.
Depending on the language, that is usually not so hard.
Example: We just changed XMLVM to use the DEX bytecode and re-wrote our ObjC
and JS output mapping to use that new language and it was basically done in
three months by two people, who didn't work on it full-time.

However, there is a second step that is essential for a cross-compilation to
succeed: You need to have the API available in your target-platform. So,
e.g. if you want to support Flash, you need to have the whole Flash API
available on the target platform, same for PHP and same for every other
language. And that's really the hard part that will take an extraordinary
amount of time!

The reason we are currently focusing on Android, is because the API is
perfect for cross-compiling it to the iPhone, because the devices and APIs
are similar. We cannot spread ourselves to thin and try supporting every
language out there.

And one final note: The core XMLVM team is not big, so our resources are
limited. So if you would like to have support for language X and target Y in
XMLVM, we would be happy to have you as a contributor for this. :)

Right now, the focus of the XMLVM developers is on the Android-to-iPhone and
Android-to-WebOS pipelines.

// Sascha


>
> Thanks,
> Michael McGlothlin
>
>
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