person by person :: point by point
[As setup, let me note that I spent the week acclimatizing by downloading an running the installer for two platforms that will have similar
overall install issues]
[Tim Holloway:] I've been looking over the basics. It's essentially designed as a way of connecting things together - there's about 5 essential entity types, including one that's essentially a daemon. A pretty radical shift from J2ME - less about programs and more about interacting components. I went googling ( very briefly and early on ) and did not find much, may we have some sample links ? Apparently there is fixing to be a pardigm shift, I saw something this week on broadcast early morning televison that strikingly resembled Teletubbies � BBC/Ragdoll Limited 1996-2004 being able to do world-class networking without any reliance on the traditional provider-consumer paradigm. Given that this has been a home-ground for lock in and freedom was the unspoken pitch I heard in the Android pitch, it would be useful in my understanding of the platform to have the list of entity types and what base computer science concepts go with what entity type. By interacting components, would you intend the traditional explaination of the user being able to use the computer for what they bought the computer for ?
[Tim Holloway:] I don't recall any major privacy issues with getting Android, but as a matter of daily business I ended up having to have both Google and Yahoo accounts a long time ago, just as I have a Sun account. While I'm not real keen on keeping around a lot of public contact points, lest the fellows in Washington decide that I'm within 16 degrees of connection to an Enemy of Freedom and clandestinely invite me on a one-way midnight flight to a tropical island paradise, neither Google or Yahoo has ever publicly abused my account info. As for privately - well, I have AT&T.... There are others in our discussion group who agree with not having an excesss of useable personal information carefully indexed by vast OC-1 farms (who use facsimilie transmission for identity verification and access-control issues). The idiots on the hill were selling private security services before all the bodies had hit the ground. I find your reservation reasonable, but what do you propose as our security approach when the only tools avaliable provide a certificate chain leading directly to our email inbox ? I have seen some military-grade security that asks that entire groups of persons provide fully cross-indexed data-stores without any enciperment, even teletubbies could do better. Have ever considered the absurdity of the phrase: "Your username and password will be sent by email" when you are on an https site ? port 25 is 'say swiss-cheese and smile.
[Tim Holloway:] In short, you might as well sign up and download the goodies. It looks like there's some potential. Be warned, however, I think it runs about 50MB before you're all done with it. I just deleted 250 + megabytes of stuff I was only tring out in practice for doing the Android download. If someones call was REALLY important to my company they would have to go through Team Lead, who is formally trained in heavy security operational environments.
[Roy Cinco:] Can J2ME people leverage their knowledge here? Or are they just talking regular Java? (I don't know J2ME or Android myself.) Most definitely yes, it is a very simple exercise in forgetting some of the abstracted use the big tools for everyting and just program like we used to.
Study Vector,
String and a few fundamental basic classes of your choice. If you can understand those, you can be on my team in an informal and very simplified
test of just ask questions and discuss the matter, exactly as we are doing here. The site says:
Android applications are written using the Java programming language. then you ask us if we can program in the Java Language. This represents the type of challenge we will get from customers and must be accounted for in initial team selection. Most definitely,
J2ME people leverage their knowledge here, just try to focus on the most simplified core you can dream up and start practicing writing apps, let us know what you come up with.
[Tim Holloway:] I doubt that knowing J2ME is going to be a big advantage, though knowing any sort of GUI programming (mobile or not) isn't going to hurt. But the Android model appears to separate the GUI code from the rest of the application rather rigidly. The classes will be a very limited set of JSuff, and we have to keep the gui stuff simple, clean and ( in my opinion ) focus on the
functionality of what a proposed app will do.
I looked over the Java sources for another micro-edition programmed pda and found that the code was suprisingly well-developed and would appear bloated to people who are not acclimatized to writing for small screens. The developer documentation for the sdk I downloaded goes to detail in pointing the would be developer in this direction.
[Tim Holloway:] On the other hand, now that I think of it, I don't recall that Android requires the full desktop JRE, so knowing the limits of J2ME - and how to work within them - might be useful. What is a desktop JRE ?
[Tim Holloway:] Incidentally, Android, like the PalmOS comes with a basic data store facility. So you have some real-world experience developing for handheld devices ? Obviously so. Let me know what your transition experience is.
[ November 18, 2007: Message edited by: Nicholas Jordan ]