Oxygene for Java takes Delphi programmers to the Java and Android platforms

At the end of November 2011, RemObjects released Oxygene for Java, previously known as Project “Cooper” as per this official blog post and, for that matter, the press release.

Anyone familiar with Delphi Prism, which is RemObjects’ .NET compiler (also known as Oxygene for .NET) will know it is a high-performance compiler with some lovely enhancements to Object Pascal and support for all features of its target platform, .NET.

Oxygene for Java is the same compiler, the same language, but targeting the Java platform. This allows you to build:

• cross-platform applications running on the Java Virtual Machine (as per the trivial Mandelbrot example I blogged about before)
• Java applets (some applets I built in Oxygene based on some online examples can be seen at this test page)
• Tomcat servlets, as discussed by Sebastian Gingter in this blog post
• probably most interestingly, Android apps. Oxygene for Java supports a full tool chain for taking Java compiled classes and making them digestible to Android’s Dalvik Virtual machine
• pretty much any other Java-based utility

In the middle of November I popped over to Antwerp, Belgium to deliver the launch presentation for Oxygene for Java at Be Delphi 2011. There are some pictures from the day’s sessions here, including a couple from my presentation that have the tell-tale Oxygene logo on the screen.

Be Delphi was a great inaugural day-long conference from a new Belgium-based Delphi community.

Since that launch presentation (and after a couple of other small jobs) I’ve spent a couple of weeks working on an Android project for a client, writing it in Oxygene for Java. More on that in another post.

I’m hoping to be making plenty of noise about this product over coming months in various forms, but until the next post, just note that Oxygene for Java is now available at the RemObjects store.

Oxygene 5

RemObjects Oxygene product line has now reached version 5 and is now written in itself to ensure continued quality as the product develops further.

Oxygene is a Delphi-like modern Object Pascal language, designed to work well with managed systems such as .NET, Mono and the Java runtime, and not worry too much about out-dated constructs that do not sit well with them. The language supports many up-to-date constructs and concepts, such as sequences, class contracts, nullable types, asynchronous methods, parallelised loops, future types and more besides.

“Project Cooper” launch pencilled in

RemObjects have added the SDN's October 2011 Software Developer Conference (SDC) in Zeist, Netherlands to their events page. The events listed on that page are conferences and events that feature sessions and material on RemObjects products, such as Delphi Prism and the W.I.P. “Project Cooper” (a Delphi Prism-like tool for building, debugging and deploying Java and Android applications).

I mention the SDN Conference in particular because this is where “Project Cooper” will be officially launched. On the evening of Monday, October 3rd I will be delivering the launch presentation, currently entitled: Presenting: Project “Cooper” - The Oxygene Language for Java and Android.

On Tuesday, October 4th I will be giving another two “Project Cooper” sessions, looking at specifics of Java and Android development. These additional sessions are still being worked out and will be made known closer to the conference date.

“Project Cooper” Mandelbrot set calculation

I’ve had a couple of people ask me on separate occasions to show some “Project Cooper” code. I’ve not posted any thus far, as the product is quite early in its beta cycle and very few people have access to it. When it has matured and is in more hands I have plans to write lots more on the subject, but since I’ve been asked, I thought I’d post a simple project.

The ever-popular Mandelbrot set is the subject of this little demo, and it’s just a simple console application, completely bypassing the Android support, just building an app that runs on the Java VM.

Podcast on “Project Cooper”

I recorded a podcast recently for RemObjects, and was interviewed by their technical evangelist Jim McKeeth. We talked about various things including Java, .NET, Mono and Mono for Android, but the chat was mostly focused on “Project Cooper”.

You can find the podcast on the RemObjects Radio site.

Fun & games with OpenGL on Android

I've been working up some demos for Project Cooper to show it working well with the Java class libraries and with the Android SDK. Most recently been trying my hand at getting some OpenGL demos going. I've briefly bumped into OpenGL over the years, but have by no means become a dab hand at navigating the mass of calls in the library and so have been finding the OpenGL documentation invaluable. To help me get something working I've been following steps in books and looking at demos found online.

One demo in a book I have involves a spinning cube (a popular type of demo), that has an image used to texture each side of the cube, and also makes the cube transparent. It's a nice looking demo for sure. I cobbled the code into a Project Cooper application and tested it out and was left very puzzled. You see, the demo ran just fine on the Android emulator. But on my shiny HTC Desire the cube had no bitmap texture on it - the cube was bare!

So the challenge was to find out why a well-performing physical Android device was beaten by the meagre emulator. The solution was found using logging, documentation, the Android source and some general web searching.

Alternative to Eclipse for Java development

If you find Eclipse a little clunky for Java development, then you might take a look at JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, which is intended to offer a smoother experience developing Java apps, with support for Java 7, JUnit and TestNG, Maven and Ant, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Subversion, Git, Mercurial and CVS, as well as Swing UI design.

It also supports Android app development, including the latest Android SDK.