<story><title>How Google Inbox shares 70% of its code across Android, iOS, and the Web</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/how-google-inbox-shares-70-of-its-code-across-android-ios-and-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>badlogic</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve been using a similar approach for libGDX [1] with great success for the past 3 years. HotSpot on Windows&amp;#x2F;Linux&amp;#x2F;Mac OS X, Dalvik on Android, RoboVM [2] on iOS and GWT on the web. We had to add quite a bit of functionality to GWT to make things work, like (very hacky) reflection. You can now share 100% of your code across all these platforms with minor restrictions due to GWT (threads, missing JRE classes&amp;#x2F;packages). Without the web, all platforms work pretty much the same. Many smaller and bigger studios have used this approach quite successfully.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the Google folks ever looked into RoboVM as a replacement for j2objc. It&amp;#x27;s a full AOT compiler, sharing the class library with Android with access to all iOS APIs (think Xamarin for Java&amp;#x2F;JVM languages). I tested j2objc when itmwas published as a potential way to get our libGDX stuff working on iOS, but it was extremely limited in its capabilities. Kinda reminded me of Oracle&amp;#x27;s terrible ADF.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/libgdx/libgdx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;libgdx&amp;#x2F;libgdx&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.robovm.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.robovm.com&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JonathonW</author><text>At least one team at Google has used libGDX (on top of RoboVM): Ingress uses libGDX for their iOS and Android clients.&lt;p&gt;RoboVM is a very cool project.  We ended up on Xamarin for the cross-platform project we were working on here internally, but, had RoboVM been a little more mature when we were evaluating cross-platform projects (this was around April of last year), it would&amp;#x27;ve most likely been our first choice instead (we have a lot more in-house Java expertise than C#).</text></comment>
<story><title>How Google Inbox shares 70% of its code across Android, iOS, and the Web</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/how-google-inbox-shares-70-of-its-code-across-android-ios-and-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>badlogic</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve been using a similar approach for libGDX [1] with great success for the past 3 years. HotSpot on Windows&amp;#x2F;Linux&amp;#x2F;Mac OS X, Dalvik on Android, RoboVM [2] on iOS and GWT on the web. We had to add quite a bit of functionality to GWT to make things work, like (very hacky) reflection. You can now share 100% of your code across all these platforms with minor restrictions due to GWT (threads, missing JRE classes&amp;#x2F;packages). Without the web, all platforms work pretty much the same. Many smaller and bigger studios have used this approach quite successfully.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the Google folks ever looked into RoboVM as a replacement for j2objc. It&amp;#x27;s a full AOT compiler, sharing the class library with Android with access to all iOS APIs (think Xamarin for Java&amp;#x2F;JVM languages). I tested j2objc when itmwas published as a potential way to get our libGDX stuff working on iOS, but it was extremely limited in its capabilities. Kinda reminded me of Oracle&amp;#x27;s terrible ADF.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/libgdx/libgdx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;libgdx&amp;#x2F;libgdx&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.robovm.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.robovm.com&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edwinnathaniel</author><text>It seems to me that RoboVM+libgdx is utilized heavily for the game industry. Correct me if I&amp;#x27;m wrong, most games don&amp;#x27;t use UI components (most of the time it&amp;#x27;s a full-screen game) the way regular apps do so I&amp;#x27;m wondering if RoboVM is a good fit for Rich-UI mobile apps?</text></comment>