IcedRobot to run Android apps on OpenJDK
IcedRobot is a new project which aims to run Android applications on OpenJDK while avoiding Android's Dalvik virtual machine and Apache Harmony's library. The project was revealed to the public at FOSDEM 2011 by developers David Fu and Mario Torre. There will be three projects in all. GNUDroid will create an Android implementation using free software from GNU Classpath and OpenJDK, to be named IcedRobot Micro Edition, and GNUBishop will then add desktop functionality to Android to create IcedRobot Standard Edition. Daneel will then be a pure Java interpreter VM for Dalvik which will provide a "bridge between the worlds" of Dalvik and OpenJDK.
There is, currently at least, no public code for the project, but Torre says that they are working to "decouple Dalvik from the custom Linux kernel that Android uses" to allow them to run the code stand-alone. They then hope to switch out Dalvik for the OpenJDK VM and add a translator to convert Android's DEX bytecode to the Java VM's bytecode. More details are available in the presentation slides and in Torre's blog. The www.icedrobot.org domain has been registered but, currently, there are no web pages for the project.
(djwm)