Developing iPhone Applications using Java

Developing iPhone Applications using Java

Apple’s iPhone has resulted in significant interest from users and developers alike. Apple’s SDK for the iPhone is based on Objective-C as the development language as well as Cocoa for the GUI. Unfortunately Apple’s license agreement for the iPhone SDK prohibits the porting of the Java virtual machine to the iPhone. In this presentation we introduce an Open Source Java-to-Objective-C cross-compiler as well as a Java-based implementation of the Cocoa library. With the help of these tools, iPhone applications can be written in pure Java. Using the Java version of Cocoa, it is possible to run a Java-based iPhone application as a Java desktop/applet application that can be cross-compiled to run natively on the iPhone. The talk will discuss the challenges of the Java-to-Objective-C cross-compiler as well as the Java-based version of Cocoa. Details are available at http://www.xmlvm.org/