I want to do an augmented reality app that runs on mobile devices, but I thing that the best way to do it is with a web application (And I have the advantage that the app will run also on PCs ) so I don't have to care about specific device implementations, I'm a java developer so I'll be so much easier for me if I can use JOGL.
All these JOGL demos run using Java Web Start, but JOGL itself is rather resource intensive. In contrast, mobile devices are typically resource limited. I don't see this being a good fit, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
JOGL does have an ES(Embedded Systems) version and the OpenGL standard itself has an ES version. Your apps will need to check available JOGL version and cut down what they do if they are in an ES environment. The modern phones especially Android can support JOGL. You can also use M3G, here is a nice link to show which phones you can actually target.
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I´m soon to start a new mobile app project and I dont have that much experience with either iOS or Android development but I have used Vaadin for presentation tier on different occasions.
The app will most likely be lightweight for the mobile client but more heavy for backend servers(jboss). I feel kinda lost so i´m asking you.
Question: What are the drawbacks of using Vaadin touchkit compared to other frameworks/ build from scratch? Where might a problem occur? Any input and recommendations are welcome!
I am currently developing a small application using Vaadin TouchKit that once it enters production will have some hundreds of users. I haven't been able to locate any publicly available apps in production that have been implemented using Vaadin Touchkit, so what I'm going to list here is based solely on my personal experience with the technology.
Drawbacks compared to native applications:
I'm assuming this is what you refer by "building from scratch".
As this is web techonology, your application performance will always correlate heavily with the quality of the users Internet connection. If you have to render large UI's with a lot of components and details, it will be slower than doing so in a native application. A lot slower if the users connection is poor. Or if a connection is unavailable, then your application pretty much becomes unavailable. There is a way to use HTML5-cache for providing an offline-mode in a Vaadin Touchkit app, but it is not very useful for storing large datasets as the cache has a lot more limitations than for example an Android SQLite database. For simple UI-stuff it might be viable, but storing data for offline-access is in my opinion pretty much out of the question.
Other than the above mentioned points, I have not run into any missing capability, as you can use any Java library at any time on the server-side, and your application will be running safely in a servlet container.
Upsides compared to native applications:
You didn't spesifically ask for the upsides, but I guess this is any input and recommendations.
Your Vaadin Touchkit app can run on basically any mid-high tier mobile device launched after 2010, basically excluding only the ones with Windows Phone OS, since Internet Explorer does not use WebKit for rendering and other browsers are not available as far as I know. And since this is a web application, it does not exclude any other desktop browsers than Internet Explorer. By creating one application, you support roughly 80-95% of your users.
As mentioned, any Java library, any internal API, any authentication method supported by your hosting environment is available to your app, which is not as easy to implement for native mobile applications. This can be overcome with great software engineering, but demands a significantly higher amount of developer resources, not to mention that you are still stuck doing it for each platform separately.
And of course maintenance of a servlet app compared to the maintenance of a native application is considerably more simple: deploy once, all users get the changes without doing anything. No app store, no versioning, no hassle.
Vaadin TouchKit compared to other web development:
I am not familiar, at all, with web application development without using Vaadin, so I am not going to tell you whether or not it is the way to go compared to other modern web application technologies and frameworks. All I'll say is that in my experience Vaadin makes creating UI's and backend functionality relevantly easy and more graspable if you are familiar with Java development and desktop application development in general.
To conclude, don't rush in to create your mission critical application using Vaadin TouchKit before at least prototyping with it, and getting to know the performance and limitations it presents. For certain type of applications, it might be one of the best solutions. For a certain, larger group than the other, it is probably one of the worst. It is not a very mature or generally adopted framework, but it is useful. I'll be happy to hear more about the type of app you're planning and help you figure out if there are any showstoppers for using Vaadin TouchKit.
P.S. You've probably already run into this, but this document opens up the guts of one of the TouchKit demo apps:
http://demo.vaadin.com/vornitologist/VAADIN/tutorial/touchkit-tutorial.html
I just tried out vaadin touchkit examples on my android phones, well now I got affirmation why I prefer native software over html in some cases. Try it out - dont be confused by nice-looking styles, just try to USE it, this is what apps are made for. In my case I cannot withstand non responsive GUI or not smoothly scrolling lists. Again, for a simple gallery - a JavaScript/HTML solution is just perfect :) So the right way is the hybrid way! (imho)
Vaadin Touchkit offers very good user experience and provides wide range of UI components to apps.
Its default iOS theme provide almost iOS like UI and it also offers many other themes too.
But this will not run as smooth as platform specific mobile apps. as ultimately it will not completely leverage the real power of mobile platform features as finally it is going to run in a mobile web browser. as compared to native mobile apps
Find more detail on vaadin touchkit and comparison with similar technogies like ZK Mobile and native platform specific apps. : http://jtechnoprojects.blogspot.in/2012/12/vaadin-touchkit-vs-zk-mobile-vs.html
I have developed an application for iPhone. Is there any way to port that application on to Blackberry RIM so that i can avoid rewriting the application in Java for Blackberry RIM?
I am rewriting my application for black berry,suggest me the way to rewrite so that later stage I can port that directly to Android.
Thanks in advance.
The short answer is no.
The closest thing I am aware of is projects like PhoneGap (and others, including Appcelerator Titanium) which allow for cross platform development for smart phones including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry by creating hardware specific wrappers around WebApps. PhoneGap essentially allows for Web Apps to have more complete access to the hardware and operating system of these devices (like the camera, motion detection, push notification, etc.) by wrapping the Web App in a customized browser that provides javascript handles for accessing the hardware.
PhoneGap will even build binaries for each of the supported platforms on their servers (with limitations...for example, if you want to submit to the Apple App Store, you currently need to build the iPhone binary yourself due to developer certificate issues).
So if your app could be (re)conceived as a Web App with some extra help accessing device specific hardward features, then PhoneGap or similar development kits might provide some shortcuts to cross platform deployment.
not really. If your app is written in custom objective-c code, then you will need to manually port it to blackberry java. there are some cross-platform app frameworks out there though that may allow you to do what you need, but youd have to redevelop your app with those frameworks.
Hi all i'm new with android but i wonder if a java 3d application run on adk?
and run in the emulator?
Ciao
giovanni
There's no Java 3D API available for Android. In fact, you're better off porting the application to use OpenGL directly for performance reasons.
Java 3D 1.6 is still maintained but it requires AWT which isn't available under Android and we don't plan to support it under Android in the future. Feel free to use JOGL 2, which supports both desktop environments and embedded environments (especially Android). If you look for a similar API supporting Android, JMonkeyEngine and LibGDX are worth a try. JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation doesn't support Android yet.
Is there a LWJGL port for Android available? (does not matter if the phone needs to rooted)
Things have happened since this question was answered in 2011.
It is new that LWJGL has support for Android.
The linked repo has the setup instructions and the demo, the actual code is in the LWJGL3 repo under the Android branch.
I've been using it for a while now, and this library has a bunch of useful features that aren't just connected to OpenGLES, OpenAL, OpenVR and Vulkan, but it also has a lot of utilities for things like 3D model loading, layouts, dialogs, fonts and a lot more. Meaning the Android port of LWJGL is a considerable add-on to the current OpenGL ES support.
As for other libraries though, you can use no libraries because of the native support. Alternatively, you can use LibGDX or jMonkeyEngine, those are the only two others I know of and have used. Note that these are frameworks and not libraries like LWJGL, meaning they set up a given system you have to follow (one of the reasons I dislike them). It's harder implementing custom features without having to bring out a lot of other parts of the framework that aren't that well documented.
One of LWJGL's main features is its OpenGL support. Android natively supports OpenGL ES so there's basically no need for LWJGL. As for the rest of LWJGL, it doesn't apply on the Android platform anyway - for example there is obviously no mouse to an Android device - so I don't see a direct LWJGL port ever being developed.
Check out the Android reference, especially the android.opengl package, for a good starting point.
A good 3D and 2D engine that uses LWJGL and works well for Android development (and also Desktop and Web Apps) is libGDX.
I can't say for sure, but during last autumn I was searching for quite a long time for that and couldn't find anything. So I would say no, but don't bank on that.
I want to wrap a website and create an application around it (kind of like the iPhone/iPod Facebook app) and i want the application to be as portable as possible so with a very few modification to the code it can run on pc, mac, iPod, android or any other.
I know that Java is known for it's portability but i dislike it and i don't know about QT.
I know this question is quite subjective but can you give me a couple of opinions and reasons for them any way?
Thanks in advance,
Dante
Qt is portable enough for the major platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOS). It has the advantage of being native code, so no virtual machine is needed. And it provides rich graphics and other powerfull features, and the GUI look and feel of the specific platform.
If you are considering the same code base to be shared between desktop and mobile platforms, think again. There are different constraints in terms of resources, screen dimensions, etc. Qt can be used for some mobile platforms (mainly Symbian, Maemoo), Java for Android and ObjectiveC/C++ for iPhone/iPod. So a cross mobile platform application using the same technology is not feasible (at least for the moment).