Re: [PLUG] Android Forums

["Louis Kratz" <louis.kratz@gmail.com>]

> And the use of Java on Linux seems fairly ludicrous to me.  There may have
> been good reasons to use Java when there were lots of different phone OS's
> and hardware platforms, but since just about everything runs some sort of
> Linux-on-ARM/XScale nowadays, why not just compile?

Java has taken off in the mobile market for a variety of reasons.
Their sale of running anywhere was good in the beginning, but whats
kept J2ME popular is its abstraction of the user interface.  If you
develop for a phone, you typically need to make your application
compliant with 80-90% of the carrier's devices, or they won't sell
your app.  The J2ME platform abstracts annoyances such as screen size,
making menus scroll, key input, and phone call interrupts.  This makes
development really easy.  While you could abstract such an API to
compile with, the virtual machine seems to have won this battle.
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