[xmlvm-users] Using xmlvm

[Dr. A. K. S. <al...@se...>]

Just to summarize some answers to questions posed by several
people recently.

Yes, it is possible to use xmlvm to port Android apps, and it's
working really well. The speed is comparable to the Android for
complex math operations. The internal user interface classes are
very similar between iPhone and Android, so it is relatively easy to
interface what is there - e.g. I did two types of ProgressDialogs in
about two days, java.net.URL in half a day and so on. You need to know
objC, of course.

Currently when your target is to convert the Android code with as
little changes as possible, you'd have to make a private branch of
xmlvm... there are so many things which can be solved ad-hoc, and
they won't get into the main branch (e.g. UI size tunings etc..)
without more effort. That said, I see rapid progress on this so
perhaps there will be a day when you can really put in an Android
app and have it recompile without too much hassle. ;-)

There are two causes of bugs which I'd like to mention specifically.

Don't compile for any iPhone OS below 2.2.1! It will work on the emulator
but will give wrong numbers on the device. There must be a bug in there
somewhere...

The exception handling is different. When the Java code would give an
Exception and fail, the objectiveC code will usually still output
something. Especially the functions which have been mapped
one-by-one behave slightly differently in the error case. E.g.
Integer.parseInt() parses the initial numbers of an argument which
begins with a number (or even with a non-number, in which case it
returns 0) while the java original would throw an Exception. This is
a minor problem, but make sure to test your error handling!


Best,
  Alex
-- 
Dr. Alexander K. Seewald

Seewald Solutions
www.seewald.at
Tel. +43(664)1106886
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