Today Google released the Android SDK, an application development stack for mobile devices.
Great news for us: The programming API is plain Java.
On a very first look the system is quite mature already. The Emulator works nicely. Eclipse plugin support is already very good. Debugging works perfectly. I had the system up and running on my machine in 10 minutes.
Of course I had to check out immediately if db4o works. Yes it does. :-)
So far I only managed to get our JDK 1.1 engine running. Apparently reflection works differently on the Android VM dubbed "Dalvik". Of course we will try to find out immediately what the issue is.
A small stepping stone to get db4o to work: Apparently root file access without a path is not allowed. I got db4o to work from within my Activity class as follows:
ObjectContainer db = Db4o.openFile(getDataDir() + "/" + "myFirstAndroidDb.db4o");
Here are some links around Android that you may find worthwhile:
Download
http://code.google.com/android/download.html
Coding Challenge
http://code.google.com/android/adc.html
Forums
http://ohadev.com/
Google Group
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers
First discussions and coverage
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/1626245
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/11/android-java
The impressive list of members of the Open Handset Alliance...
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html
...and what their CEOs say
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/member_quotes.html
Kudos to Cedric Beust, Bob Lee and all the other smart guys at Google!
Thanks, you made my day.
Enjoy Android!
...with db4o of course. :-)