Tag: iPhone

iPhone Barcode Scanners and Boosting Innovation

Here is a good article about a barcode scanner library for the iPhone. One interesting thing is that the imaging library used in the app is available in a SDK sold by the company.
It seems that the application is meant to drive sales of the API.
I suppose this is not a new idea, but I have never done something like this so it was new to me :).
Seem interesting?

Visiting the iPhone Dev SDK Forums

The iPhone Dev SDK Forums are just that; a collection of forums whose topics of discussion encompass just about every aspect of working in this market. Specific forum focuses range from low-level details of APIs and tooling to business topics like how best to market and support your product.
Having spent about an hour clicking around there; I got the impression that it was a pleasant community and look forward to spending more time there.

Cross-compiling Java to Objective-C for the iPhone

It seems that you can cross compile Java to Objective-C on the iPhone. I didn’t dig any deeper than that.
Here is the blurb for the technologies used:

The goal of XMLVM is to offer a flexible and extensible cross-compiler toolchain. Instead of cross-compiling on a source code level, XMLVM cross-compiles byte code instructions from Sun Microsystem’s virtual machine and Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime. The benefit of this approach is that byte code instructions are easier to cross-compile and the difficult parsing of a high-level programming language is left to a regular compiler. In XMLVM, byte code-based programs are represented as XML documents. This allows manipulation and translation of XMLVM-based programs using advanced XML technologies such as XSLT, XQuery, and XPath.

Apple’s iPhone has generated huge interest amongst users and developers alike. Like MacOS X, the iPhone development environment is based on Objective-C as the development language and Cocoa for the GUI library. The iPhone SDK license agreement does not permit the development of a virtual machine. Using XMLVM, we circumvent this problem by cross-compiling Java to the iPhone. Just like a Java application can be cross-compiled to AJAX, XMLVM can be used to cross-compile a Java application to Objective-C. The cross-compilation is also accomplished by mimicking a stack-based machine in Objective-C. Consider the instruction (integer remainder) that pops two integers off the stack and pushes their remainder after division back onto the stack. Using the following XSL template, the instruction can be mapped to Objective-C.

(via the PLT Mailing List)