Saturday, March 19, 2011

Graphics AWT/Swing/Android interoperability woes

Gotta take the good with the bad I guess, but I got a gripe and maybe writing this post will help me get it out of my system.

Interoperability for android graphics are a mess... I wonder whether sometimes they change the API just to annoy me.  For instance in android we have Colors that are treated as ints, but in AWT it's a Color object/class, likewise drawing on the canvas (in Android) is simular but different than in Android... So what I'm asking for is a simple Middleware interface API that allows you to implement both i.e. an interface that abstracts drawing to a canvas (whether it be a AWT/swing canvas or an Android canvas)...

Here's why... I'm writing this middleware (A contour plotting application) that should work for BOTH a Java Desktop application AND Android, but in order to do so I have to write all this abstraction around the implementation... (wait a minute, what happened to write once, run anywhere?)

This "contour engine" which (given a matrix of elevations) generates a contour map presents contour graphs on the screen.


I'm basically stealing (like all great artists do) code from WV Snyder  ...who wrote it in FORTRAN... in 1978.  Now, I'm not doing crazy OpenGL graphics or anything like that, I'm doing the very basic of basic, setting colors, drawing lines, drawing the occasional text... But its a pain to basically separate the logic out to write to separate Canvas implementations (one for AWT, one for Android).

And this is just the beginning, I also ran into some major differences trying to do many other "simple" operations... maybe I'll write one, but you'd think Google could go ahead and whip one up just to make me happy.

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