Sebastian Mancke

The OpenMoko people were so kind to put my blog on the planet. Now I can use also this channel to keep you informed about the Jalimo project and the distribution Integration.

Jalimo is a project for enhancing the Java support across the different mobile&embedded distributions. Over the years Robert Schuster and I where missing continuous Java support in the Linux mobile distributions, we were playing with. Off course there was always a way to get a free JVM running but no one was searching and solving the problems, Java programmers had on targeting those devices. As we also noticed the need for a Java mobile platform in our company, we started Jalimo (approx. one year ago).

Since the beginning of the project we had maemo and OpenMoko in focus, as the primary target platforms. They have different toolchains (Scratchbox vs. OpenEmbedded), which both had no proper Java support. After a period of experimenting we now have a very clean Java support and support for generating maemo packages in OpenEmbedded. So now, beyond maemo and OpenMoko, all the other OpenEmbedded based distributions can use those recipes too, so that we don’t have to redo the work for others.

OpenEmbedded is great for generating a complete distribution but will most likely never be the tool of choice for a usual Java application developer. Those people nowadays mostly use maven. For this reason we have created a packaging plugin for maven. This plugin allows a Java developer to generate .deb or .ipkg packages out of a usual maven project, using a single command. Since the plugin has special support for our target platforms, it allows a smooth integration e.g. it translates the maven dependencies to clean distribution dependencies. With this, we hope, any Java developer can write and deploy Linux mobile apps without changing their used toolchain.

The main packages of Jalimo (which are already integrated in the official OpenMoko repositories) consist of: cacao, gnu classpath and SWT (with GTK peer) for the GUI. This is a set which fulfils the most common requirements, but we support alternatives and additional packages in our extra repositories. e.g. jamvm (with a faster startup), midpath, Swing, java-gnome bindings (unfortunately no recent version), java-dbus and some more. If you like to see support for something not included, please get in touch! For example sometimes I think we also should include the Sun PhoneME, to show the people that we also could choose a very fast JVM, if we want to but since it seems, that nobody needs it, we don’t have done this integration for now.