A colleague recently sent me a link to the following:
Google Releases Open-Source Code to Convert Java to Objective-C
Yeah, that’s cool and all. But to me, that’s like saying:
Google Releases Open-Source Code to Convert Ebonics to Spanglish.
Just saying. Come to think of it, I haven’t checked Google Translate, but knowing Google they probably have.
In my opinion, if you really want to do cross platform development use one of the tools like Mono to write C# cross-platform or the ProtonSDK to write cross-platform C++. In both cases, you have significantly better options for cross-platform code reuse.
Or perhaps you’re more interested in a UI-based solution. In that case I recommend using an HTML5/JavaScript solution to create your cross-platform native mobile apps. The two frameworks that come to mind are Titanium and PhoneGap, but there are others as well.
If you’re doing mobile game development, why not jump directly to a cross-platform game engine like Unity3D, Cocos2D, or even Adobe’s Flash.
Of all the ones listed above, the only one I haven’t used is Cocos2D, but I have a colleague that swears by it. They’re all great solutions (my current favorite for 2D games is C# and XNA through MonoGame.
Or, yes.. you could write your code in Java, convert everything except the UI to Objective-C through Google’s new utility. Sure, you’ll then be maintaining two code bases, but I’m sure you have the resources for that.
