Comment #6 on issue 222 by [email protected]: Port Piccolo2D APIs to Android
http://code.google.com/p/piccolo2d/issues/detail?id=222
I think the concern is that Agile2D will not run on Android, as it has
dependencies on java.awt.Color and java.awt.Shape, etc.
Honestly, the effort in porting the core Java code over is not that bad.
The real question is whether the ported code is going to perform well on
Android. The biggest issue is that you must not allocate ANY objects on
the paint thread under Android if you want any sort of performance. See:
http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2010/08/02/shifting-gears-from-desktop-to-mobile.html
And Romain Guy has some tweets linked from there as well describing the
issue. I think it just turns out that Dalvik does not do nearly a good a
job of allocating/deallocating objects as Hotspot or others.
Combine these changes with the lack of a color object, some variations on
matrices, etc... and it starts to look different enough to not be
compatible.
If the core APIs were refactored not to have any dependencies on java.awt,
Java2D, or Swing, as mentioned above, that would dramatically help things,
but I worry that is a bit of a long term project. And I think it would be
good to have a prototype version of the Android code running at least to do
that. One concern is the whole 'never allocate on the paint thread' issue
does have consequences for the overall API.
The code I have does a basic PCanvas and some simple PNodes. A few of the
simpler example apps have been ported over. The challenge is that the
internals are changing a lot as I move things over to avoid doing things
like allocating objects on the paint thread.
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