Android Open Handset Developers Community

Hi all,
Opera Lab has announced yesterday to have just finalized a new version of its popular mobile web broswer for the Android platform .

Even though there is currently no hardware available that is capable to run Android os, you can evaluate the Opera Mini Android version using the Android emulator

Not so bad for a platform that is still in beta version.

According to the guys from Opera:
"When we first heard about Google Android, we were very excited about the possibilities it presents, and thought it would be very cool to make Opera Mini available on it, plus it would give mobile developers a better choice of browsers to make available on handsets."

Technically speaking, it is very interesting to take into account the information mentioned by Opera developers about the strategy adopted to port the code towards the Android platform.

Considering that the Android platform is vary similar to Java SE, they created a wrapper to translate Java ME (mostly MIDP) API calls into Android API calls. The wrapper was based on a Java implementation of J2ME in J2SE (named MicroEmulator), so at the end of the story, the most effort consuming part was to replace AWT /Swing graphics backend of MicroEmulator with Android specific APIs.