Java Mobile Apps

9/5/2019by

by Adrian D. Finlay

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Java for Mobile Devices is a set of technologies that let developers deliver applications and services to all types of mobile handsets, ranging from price efficient feature-phones to the latest smartphones. Sep 13, 2010  Java is one of the most widely discussed, taught, and used programming languages on the planet. It’s used for many different types of programming projects, no matter their scale, from web applications to desktop applications to mobile applications. Aug 23, 2018  How to make a Cross-Platform Mobile App in Java Source: GIPHY. Did you know that you can use Java to make cross platform mobile apps? Yes, pinch yourself, you read that right the first time! I’ll teach you the basics of how to use your existing Java knowledge to create performant apps on Android and iOS in 12 easy steps. Java becomes particularly invincible for mobile app development because of its platform independence. While with most programming languages you invariably need a compiler to minimise the size of your code to fit into the machine Java allows you the flexibility to use portable code across the machines thanks to the source files widely known as ‘bytecode’ in the world of Java programmers. Nice and usefull features of this app will keep you captivated for a very long time. At PHONEKY, you will find many other apps and games of different genres, from Education and Entertainment to the Security and Navigation Java apps. To see the Top 10 best Java software for mobile phones, just sort apps.

Did you know that you can use Java to make cross platform mobile apps? Yes, pinch yourself, you read that right the first time! I’ll teach you the basics of how to use your existing Java knowledge to create performant apps on Android and iOS in 12 easy steps. We will do this all using JavaFX as the GUI toolkit.

But first, some more foreground. You will need to meet the subsequent requirements to be able to build an application for both Android and iOS. However, if you do not desire to build an iOS application, you can feel free to develop on any x64 bit machine that supports Java SE 8. This project will be a Git repository built with gradle. But you do not need to create a Git repository.

The following are the requirements:

  • A JDK 1.8 Compliant JVM
  • Android Command Line Tools (SDK v.27)
  • XCode 9.2
  • Gradle 4.2
  • Git Large File Storage (v.2.5.0) (Unnecessary if you do not want to create a git repository)
  • Preferably at least 4G RAM

Impatient? Want to see an end result? Check out the completed project below.

X-wing fighter games. afinlay5/OnyxFx
Gradle source code repository for OnyxFx, a cross-platform (Android/iOS/Linux/macOS/Windows) JavaFX app rendering…github.com

My development environment will be Fedora Linux 28 and macOS High Sierra. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dig in.

1) Create a folder to house the project

I hosted my project, OnyxFx, as follows: “/home/adriandavid/Projects/OnyxFx”. You are, of course, free to host the project wherever you please.

2) Initialize gradle, Git, set JAVA_HOME

Java Mobile App Development Tools

Open a terminal in the root of the project directory. If gradle is properly configured, you should see something like this after executing the following command:

You need to make sure that gradle lists your Java Development Kit (JDK) 8 installation adjacent to the section labeled “JVM”.

While there are many ways to do this, the most straightforward way is to ensure that your JAVA_HOME environmental variable is properly set.

Depending on your environment, there are many ways to do this. One way to do this in most *nix environments is to set the variable in /home/<user>/.bashrc or /etc/profile. See the manual for your operating system to ensure that your JAVA_HOME environmental variable is set correctly.

You can include the following lines at the end of either .bashrc or profile to ensure that JAVA_HOME is set correctly.

Note: You may install Oracle’s JDK 8 here.

Then, make sure that the shell reflects the above changes by running one of the following commands:

Enter the following command to verify that the variable is correctly set:

If you are still experiencing difficulty or you are using Microsoft Windows, see here.

First, run git init in the project’s root directory to initialize the Git repository. Note: should you not desire to host a git repository, you may skip this step.

Second, run gradle init in the project’s root directory to initialize the gradle repository. This step is required.

Note: You will notice that my example appears slightly different. This is because I already have gradle and Git initialized on my local environment.

3) Get groovy! Edit gradle.build and

Hopefully Earth, Wind, & Fire can help you get groovy! Power up your favorite text editor, and edit your build.gradle located in your project’s root directory and replace the contents with the contents of the following GitHub gist.

These build.gradle settings configure our gradle project to use the javafxmobile plugin, which is the work horse of our project. You can learn more about the plugin here and here. Among many things, the javafxmobile plugin automates the process of downloading (from Maven Central or jcenter) and adding the iOS and Android SDKs to your application’s classpath.

If you are familiar with gradle, maven, or ant, great — you probably have an idea of what’s going on. If you are not familiar with gradle, don’t worry about it. All you need to understand is that gradle is a build tool used to automate many tasks involved in building apps such as: grabbing dependencies, project organization, and so on.

Notice that we are targeting Android 7.1 Nougat (API version 25) and iOS 11 (we will see where this is done shortly). You may adjust these values as you see fit. Note, however, that in the case of Android, you must ensure that the API version matches the version of the SDK that you have download (more on this later).

Lastly, I will not demonstrate the production of signed executables in this tutorial. For this reason, iOSSkipSigning is set to true and we do not make use of the releaseAndroid gradle task. You can, however, provide the appropriate accommodations to produce signed apps.

4) Make a new file called gradle.properties and configure it

Create a new file in the project’s root directory called gradle.properties and add the following content to the file.

These settings tell the javafxports plugin to use an iPhone-7 as the on-board emulator, to target iOS 11, and to pass the Xms and Xmx flags to the JVM, which specifies both the initial memory pool to 4GB and the maximum heap memory pool to 8GB. This will be necessary for the compilation of the openJDK and the development of the iOS build.

5) Install Homebrew (iOS only)

If you do not have a Mac and are not intending to produce an iOS build, feel free to skip this step.

Open the terminal in macOS and paste the following command.

6) Install the USB Multiplexing Socket (iOS only)

Only move on to this step if Homebrew has successfully installed. If you do not have a Mac and are not intending to produce an iOS build, feel free to skip this step.

Open the terminal in macOS and paste the following command.

7) Grab the Android Command Line Tools

Grab Android Command Line Tools for your platform here. After the download has finished, unzip the folder and paste the contents in the directory of your choice. For me, this was /home/<user>/Android.

8) Set Android_HOME, Grab necessary Android packages

As with Java, gradle needs to know where to look to find the Android Command Line Tools. There are a few ways to do this. However, in the spirit of simplicity and consistency, we will set the ANDROID_HOME environmental variable in this tutorial. Add the following variable in the same way that we did it for JAVA_HOME. For example:

Remember to reload the shell by adding source <file> as we did for JAVA_HOME.

Now, grab the tools necessary to build the Android build. Execute the following command:

Take careful notice that the SDK and API version we have specified in gradle.build correspond to the version we have specified in this command. Namely, “25”. Should this be misaligned, the build will not succeed.

9) Create the application’s directory structure

To automate the process of creating these directories, execute the following shell script.

Bourne-Again Shell / Korn Shell:

Windows Shell (cmd):

Save the file as mkpdir.bat or mkpdir.sh and execute the file from the project’s root directory as root (or Administrator).

Notice that we created directories for embedded and desktop. We will produce a desktop build, because it takes no additional work to do so. However, we will not produce any builds for embedded devices.

10) Create your JavaFX Application!

Navigate to /src/<platform>/java and begin developing your JavaFx application! Application resources are stored in /src/<platform>/resources.

You can start with a simple Hello World application or look at the source code that I have put together here. OnyxFx is an application I made, following these instructions, that makes REST calls over HTTP to the OnyxFxAPI. The API, in turn, is a web scraper that will return the statistical data (points per game, rebounds per game, assists per game) for the NBA® player and season the client specifies. It returns the data as JSON, which is then parsed and displayed to the screen of the mobile app. Feel free to edit it!

Keep in mind that although you can share source code, you should include custom edits in each copy of the source, should you want to make device specific changes.

Also note that the underlying compiler (MobiDevelop’s fork of RoboVM) does not fully support all Java 8 APIs. If you look very closely at my source code, you will notice that in the iOS version of the source code, I have removed unsupported API such as java.util.function.BiConsumer and java.util.Map.replace().

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11) Create a RAM disk for iOS builds (iOS only)

The compilation process for iOS is very resource-heavy, as the plugin will compile the entire openJDK and other libraries twice to create a fat JAR that it will use to build your application. Therefore, you should preemptively create a RAM disk to accommodate for the memory requirements.

This step, however, is subject to your judgement of your machine’s capabilities. For context, the macOS machine that I used to compile my iOS app has 4GB of DDR2 RAM. I decided to make an 8GB RAM disk. To do so, execute the following command in the terminal.

12) Build and Run your application!

To build your application, execute the gradle wrapper in the root directory from the terminal as follows.

This will produce a desktop application packaged as a JAR with scripts to run the application provided in /build/distributions/<AppName.tar>; and /build/distributions/<AppName.zip>. Should you unzip the directories, you will notice the following structure:

Notice that in /bin there are scripts to execute the application. These scripts rely on preserving the current folder structure. Also notice that is not necessary for you to have tree installed. It is used here simply for illustrative purposes.

There is, additionally, a standalone JAR that you can use to execute the application on any desktop environment supporting JavaFX 8. To run the application, execute one of the following:

View this project’s gradle tasks

You can view this project’s gradle tasks by running the following in the project’s root directory.

To Compile, Run on Desktop

The following command will run your project in the host environment.

You will find a standalone jar in build/libs/<AppName&gt;.jar .

To Compile, Run on Android

You will find two APKs in build/javafxports/android.
The first will be named <AppName&gt;.apk.
The second will be named <AppName>-unaligned.apk.

To Compile, Run on iOS

You will find three executables in build/javafxports/ios.
The first will be named <AppName&gt;.ipa.
The second will be named <AppName>.dSYM.
The third will be named &lt;AppName>.app.

Some screenshots of my sample app

On Desktop

On Android

On iPhone

On iPad

Splash Screen

My Closing Thoughts

javafxports is a promising project that aims to bring JavaFX and the Java SE platform onto mobile and other devices. In a way, the tool parallels Xamarin in its efforts. However, the project has a lot of work left to be done.

For a start, the plugin currently does not fully support Java 8. On Android, it uses retrolambda to handle Java 8 Lambda Expressions & Method References. It technically is up to Java 6. Additional dependencies make it such that you can use Java 8. However, the process is straightforward, the builds work as expected, and the compilation time is not too long.

On iOS, however, the builds are extremely memory-intensive and the compilation process takes a very long time. The following is a snippet of the log for ./gradlew createIpa task.

In total, the process consumed about over 6GB of RAM on my machine. This is hardly ideal. However, the future is promising. A company called Gluon has developed a high performance, fully modular custom JVM fully supporting Java 9, that you can read more about here.

This article is originally published on the blog section of my homepage, here.

Resources to explore:

  • JavaFxMobile Plugin Git Repo: https://github.com/javafxports/javafxmobile-plugin
  • JavaFxPorts Documentation: http://docs.gluonhq.com/javafxports/#_how_it_works
  • JavaFxPorts Homepage: http://javafxports.org/
  • Gluon Documentation: https://gluonhq.com/developers/documentation/
  • Google Groups Page for JavaFxPorts: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/javafxports
  • StackOverflow Page for JavaFxPorts: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javafxports
  • Gluon Mobile Pricing/License Options: https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/buy/

The Importance of Learning Java for Mobile App Development - If you want to master the Android application development then learn Java

The Importance of Learning Java for Mobile App Development - If you want to master the Android application development then learn Java

Java Mobile Application Development Framework


Java for Mobile Application Development - Check the importance of Java

As a mobile app developer you already know that android is the most popular mobile app platform with largest number of devices running on this. It's already a common knowledge that android is based upon Java. Naturally Java being the core of android is likely to be the most preferred language for aspiring android developers. If you want to master the skill of android development you have no option but to learn Java.

Do lately there have been other languages that can be used for coding android mobile apps Java is still considered to be the standard language for android mobile app development. If you are already acquainted with the power and flexibility of android platform you must know that all these qualities can be attributed to Java. Like the huge contribution job are made in developing modern web it also emerged as the most important programming language for android mobile app development.

Key aspects that make Java invincible for mobile app developers

Java Mobile Apps Jar

Java as a programming language has been there for more than two decades and it is still one of the most popular and widely used programming languages world over. The popularity and phenomenal growth of Java as the preferred programming language for multiple platforms became possible thanks to its core features that include the following:

  1. Java is easy to learn and quick to master for new developers
  2. Java has been developed as the platform independent language that can be deployed using virtual missions
  3. Java is object-oriented language with unmatched flexibility
  4. Java is versatile to incorporate variety of features and different applications.
  5. Java ensures top notch security in different programming and running environments
  6. Java comes packed with a huge variety of inbuilt tools and IDEs to ensure diverse applications.
  7. Being there for 22 years as the most popular programming language it boasts of a huge community of developers and programmers.
  8. When programming with Java you can always access any kind of resources from the Java community and huge number of tools available for free.

Why Java is invincible for multi-platform development?

At a time when cross-platform development takes the lead over platform specific development, you need to develop your source code in language that offers flexible multiplatform deployment and in that regard Java comes as supreme.

Java Mobile Apps And Games

Java becomes particularly invincible for mobile app development because of its platform independence. While with most programming languages you invariably need a compiler to minimise the size of your code to fit into the machine Java allows you the flexibility to use portable code across the machines thanks to the source files widely known as ‘bytecode’ in the world of Java programmers. This byte code operated by Java virtual machine across the devices allow Java to become platform independent and easily deploy the same code across different device platforms.

Finally to conclude we must refer to the undermatched remuneration and career growth which is promised for proficient Java developers. As for top-notch career opportunity for programmers and mobile app developers still proficiency in Java is a crucial consideration for most employers.

Java Mobile Application Development Tutorial Pdf

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