j2objc - A Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime. - Google Project Hosting
J2ObjC is an open-source command-line tool from Google that translates Java code to Objective-C for the iOS (iPhone/iPad) platform. This tool enables Java code to be part of an iOS application's build, as no editing of the generated files is necessary. The goal is to write an app's non-UI code (such as data access, or application logic) in Java, which is then shared by web apps (using GWT), Android apps, and iOS apps.
J2ObjC supports most Java language and runtime features required by client-side application developers, including exceptions, inner and anonymous classes, generic types, threads and reflection. JUnit test translation and execution is also supported.
J2ObjC is currently between alpha and beta quality. Several Google projects rely on it, but when new projects first start working with it, they usually find new bugs to be fixed. Apparently every Java developer has a slightly different way of using Java, and the tool hasn't translated all possible paths yet. It's initial version number is 0.5, which hopefully represents its release status correctly.
What J2ObjC isn't
J2ObjC does not provide any sort of platform-independent UI toolkit, nor are there any plans to do so in the future. iOS UI code needs to be written in Objective-C or Objective-C++ using Apple's iOS SDK (Android UIs using Android's API, web app UIs using GWT, etc.).
Requirements
This package must be built on a Mac OS X system, with:
- Xcode 4 or higher
- Java for OS X
- Apache Maven
