Android Open Handset Developers Community

Hi all,
I am a little bit confused about relations between Android and the Java Micro Edition (JME) platforms...

Differences ? Similarities ?

Hi Verix,
waiting for a better answer form somebody more technical skilled than me, I can say to you that Google has developed its own java virtual machine named Dalvik for Android, instead of using the standards-based Java Micro Edition (JME) from SUN as an engine to run java applications on new Android mobile phones.

At the moment, I think that Android offers quite the same APIs of the Standard Edition (JSE) than the Micro editoon ones, and this is a clear advantage for developers...

Android supports a large set of Java SE APIs; apart from this, let me highlight that Dalvik VM cannot be considered as a Java VM.

Dalvik VM can run Android bytecode but cannot run Java bytecode. When you compile Java code within the Android SDK, the dx tool coverts java bytecode to a bytecode which can be interpreted by the Dalvik VM.

As far as I know, Google plans to open the VM code in future SDKs.

best regards,
Barban

So, to sum up, Android applications are written in Java and this makes possible to rely on a very well known programming language as well as on a lot of free Java IDEs (like Eclipse). Android SDK is based on Apache Harmony's implementation of Java SE class library but it compiles the source java code into Dalvik bytecode (.dex) and not Java bytecode (.class).

The Dalvik VM is supposed to be optimized to improve performance of applications for the Open Handset Alliance phones based on the Linux kernel.

Nevertheless, in this way, Google can be free from the terms imposed by Sun for the future of the language and the virtual machine...