Hi guys,
I just did a little experiment that I was wanting to do for quite a while
now and finally did it: XMLVM as a webservice. This is really just a small
hacked-together prototype as I wanted to see whether I could deploy XMLVM on
AppEngine. Turns out, I can.
Before I send you off to try out the prototype, let me get the intentions
straight: I would like to see and hear from you, whether you think such an
application would actually be useful. For those of that you don't want to
download, compile and run XMLVM, this would offer a way to compile your app
without installing or downloading anything. This prototype doesn't do much,
so it will not be useful for your now, but if there is interest, I would try
to explore this a bit further to see how far we could go.
Alright, alright here is the small demo:
http://webxmlvm.appspot.com/
What you can do there: In the form, choose a class file (a compiled Java
file) from your machine and hit "Send". What you should then see on the
screen is the output you would get when you had chosen to compile your class
file to Objective-C. You should see a .h file as well as a .m file on the
screen in front of you. Of course there is also the chance that you see a
big stack trace, as it's just a prototype :)
If this could be interesting for people, here is something you might be able
to do if we invest more time in it:
You have your Android project (or whatever project you have), you zip it up
and upload it to our Web Service. XMLVM cross-compiles it and gives you a
ZIP file back for download, which then contains e.g. an iPhone project or
whatever you selected as the output.
I know AppEngine very well and know that it has a lot of limitations. But I
could imagine that they can be worked around. For now this is just a nice
playground for me, but if you think it could be useful, I would go ahead and
explore the idea a bit more. But maybe downloading and compiling XMLVM is
not a big issue for you and a webservice would not be useful for you, in
which case, it will remain just a toy project :)
// Sascha
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