Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
No, Java was designed from the ground up to be a multi platform interpreted development system. The difference is the installer; the Android installer uses files packaged in something called an APK, WebOS uses a different installer, but the program code itself is the same. Now, it would appear that PlayBook is also using Java, meaning if you package the Android or WebOS apps in a file format that the PlayBook installer understands it will run.
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well, not exactly right either. As an interpreted language the runtime interpretor is going to be different for each platform. Now as the new Crackberries are running a special wrapper layer over QNX there was was very likely an existing interpretor for QNX. This makes it easy for RIM to get with the folks at Sun. Same might be said for Android in that it runs on top of Linux, right?
So sure each platform obviously needs a native installer for each OS but the main difference is not just the installer, it's the runtime for that given OS and that version of Java for the version of the underlying OS. It's not impossible and of course Java's original intent was to be cross platform, the same promise has been made for pretty much every interpreted language.
Novell's Mono is a good example of a good try at leveraging the interpreted nature of C# as well (also they tried a runtime for Visual Basic) but since MS and most MS developers seem to lack the restraint to not use the latest Windows specific code in their apps, I am amazed Novell's Mono project made it as far as they have. So the promises of cross platform plug-n-play code comes down to the developers not using functions specific to a given platform and/or the interpretor handling as much of the original version for a given language.
My point is even a C# or Visual Basic app can run on the Crackberry OS as long as the runtime is there. Java is not special or unique in that regard.