Ice for Android

Ice for Android

Ice for Android offers a robust, fully-featured distributed computing solution to help you create reliable networked applications for Google's open-source mobile platform.

Whether you are integrating Android with an existing Ice application or building a new product from the ground up, Ice for Android can drastically improve your productivity and speed your time to Market.

Overview

With its familiar development tools, low cost of entry and wide range of features, it's no wonder that Android is such a compelling platform for deploying networked applications. Ice for Android is the perfect solution for a developer in search of a better way to build mobile clients. Together with Ice Touch, our Ice implementation for iPhone, developers can now target two of the most advanced mobile platforms on the market today.

Ice for Android uses the Ice for Java run time, which means you get all of the powerful features that you expect from a state-of-the-art Ice run time. Since Ice for Android supports the same easy-to-use APIs as Ice for Java, you can leverage your existing code and experience to get productive right away.

Android's development tools offer tight integration with Eclipse, the open-source IDE of choice for many Java developers. Using Eclipse and Google's ADT, you can write your code, design your user interfaces, and deploy applications to an Android emulator or device. To further improve your productivity, ZeroC has created an Eclipse plug-in that automates the translation of your Slice files and manages the resulting generated code. Click on the screen image below to see Eclipse in action as it highlights a compilation error in a Slice file:

To get you started with a firm foundation, Ice for Android includes three sample programs that demonstrate how to write networked Android applications with Ice:

Hello

The hello client is a more elaborate version of the classic Hello World example. It allows you to send a request to the server using one of the various Ice invocation models, and includes settings that let you simulate a delay in the server and learn how Ice handles timeout situations.

Chat

The chat client gives Android devices native access to our chat application. This program is especially instructive for Android developers because it demonstrates the proper techniques for issuing asynchronous invocations without disrupting the responsiveness of the user interface. It also makes use of Ice's bidirectional connection facility that lets an Android application receive "push notifications" from remote servers.

Library

The library client shows how an enterprise developer can create mobile applications with capabilities equivalent to traditional desktop applications. This program is a front-end for remotely querying and manipulating a relational database implemented using JDBC. The client is configured to use a server hosted by ZeroC, but the server's source code is included in the Ice distribution if you prefer to run it on your own host.

Feature Highlights

• Complete Ice run time with support for all Slice types
• Thread-safe API for building multi-threaded applications
• Support for TCP, SSL, and UDP
• Synchronous and asynchronous invocation models
• Server-side support, so Android applications can act as servers
• Dynamic invocation, which applications can use to construct and parse Ice messages on the fly
• Support for push applications via bidirectional connections, so remote servers can invoke operations on objects implemented in an Android device, even in the presence of firewalls
• Full interoperability with existing Ice applications, written in any supported language and running on any supported operating system
• Eclipse plug-in to manage your Slice files and streamline your development process
• Compatible with Android 2.3 or later

What You Need

Here is what you will need to get started with Ice for Android:

• A development machine running Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows
• The free Android SDK, which includes an Android emulator
• An installation of Ice 3.5.0
• The Slice2Java Eclipse plug-in, which simplifies the translation of Slice files for Eclipse users

Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.