Charm Down Available

One of the components in an end-to-end Java Mobile solution is the integration with low-level platform APIs. This is exactly what the Charm Down module intends to address. Using Charm Down, you write code that access device and hardware features using a uniform, platform-independent API. At runtime, the appropriate implementation (charm-down-desktop, charm-down-android, charm-down-ios) makes sure the platform specific code is used to deliver the functionality.

There are a lot of potential features we can support, and it requires specific knowledge in specific areas to implement those. While for most features, there is already some code in other libraries, one of the goals of Charm Down is to explicitly leverage the JavaFX Platform, its features and its patterns.

We are happy to announce that Charm-Down is now an open source module, developed in our gluonhq-oss repo at BitBucket. We are currently working on version 0.0.2-SNAPSHOT, and just to help you get started we have already pushed version 0.0.1 to the usual maven repositories, so you can start using it:

groupId: com.gluonhq
artifactId: charm-down-common
version: 0.0.1

Note that at runtime, you also need the artifactId charm-down-android, charm-down-ios or charm-down-desktop. The project is coordinated by Gluon, and we are very happy some distinguished members of the JavaFX Community (such as José Pereda and Jens Deters) already contributing to it. One of the biggest assets of JavaFX is the knowledgeable and helpful community around it.

We welcome all feedback on this project. Also, if you want to contribute please complete the Contributor License Agreement, fork the repository and feel free to send us your pull requests.

One by one, the obstacles for having real cross platform Java on mobile devices are being removed. Charm-Down is yet another step in this direction. Let’s make it happen.