On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:54:23 +0200, Casper Bang <[email protected]>
wrote:
What could possibly be the motivation for this? Java seems to be a
pretty
good match for Android and its minor drawbacks are by far outweighed by
its
many, many strengths.
Legislation by court rulings? I think Google chose Java for pragmatic
reasons at the time, not because they were particular in love with the
language.
It doesn't take long to spot the rough corners of Android. Interfacing
with
the native platform is a pain. Google had to invent a special language
for
3D (RenderScript). The type-unsafe XML layout stuff integrates funky with
casts all over etc. This latter point was also highlighted by Gavin King
when he presented Ceylon; "Java is joined at the hip with XML, and this
hurts almost every Java developer almost every day" and "There is simply
no
good way to define a user interface in Java, and that is a language
problem".
Casts could be easily solved by using objectized keys rather than pure
ints. We already discussed this in the past and Cèdric asserted that the
choice of ints was done because of performance reasons. Fair enough, but
perhaps this was true at the beginning and could be no more a problem with
recent hardware and Android versions. This is basically the most annoying
point of the Java+XML integration in Android UI. While there can be of
course better solutions, the statement by Gavin King seems excessive to me
in a practical environment.
Unfortunately I've not found the time to try Visage for Android, which on
paper is excellent.
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
[email protected]
http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it
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