Monday, November 12, 2007

Android is out: But am a bit disappointed.

This is a follow up on my earlier article "speculating on Android". Google has finally released the SDK for Android platform and with a first look at the APIs I am not too happy. Not because my main assumption of inclusion of a scripting interface went entirely for a toss, but because Android has a whole new set of Java libraries (APIs) rather than adopting a standard set of Java APIs. Another claim was that development on Android platform would be easy and fast. But with my experience of using Java from mobile to desktop to server has it that a very strong design and object orientation skills have to go in to develop flexible and robust applications. When you have a "good enough" and many times an evolving design it is not really RAD. RAD is what is been offered by initiatives like, pys60 (python on Nokia S60 phones).

After a bit of pondering over the APIs it does some how feel that many of those are needed but are in no way available in Standard Java libraries. One of such aspects is the touch APIs (http://code.google.com/android/samples/ApiDemos/src/com/google/android/samples/graphics/TouchPaint.html).

But here again I fail to understand as to why the standard Java graphics libraries are not used and instead Android's own libraries are used. This to me feels like introducing more confusion than "helping " the people who develop on Java platform. In essence, I simply do not understand the necessity of learning completely new set of APIs for programming on Android and that too in a "write once and run every where" language.

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