Random thoughts after Google I/O

Just like the year before, I was in the fortunate position of being able to attend Google I/O. When I was still living in Virginia, such a trip would have been only wishful thinking, so I am very grateful for such opportunities. The meetings were amazing, and smarter and more eloquent people than myself have already reported more than enough about it. I will try not to bore anyone by yet another rehash of the Wave demo, or all the other cool things that have been announced. In other words, I will keep this short ;-)

One of the talks I attended was called Writing Real-Time Games for Android, and it turned out one of my favourite sessions. I will not pretend to have understood everything (Chris Pruett certainly lost me when he started talking about the different graphics features on the device), but it was inspiring to see the quality of output that could be achieved on such a device. And it was all in Java, a language that I actually understood.

When I first blogged about my new hobby-project of making the JOGRE gaming engine work with an App Engine backend, I got asked why I was going after a framework that used a Java client, when Javascript and HTML canvas seemed the new way to go. My response was relatively bland. Bascially, I did not really care about building a state-of-the-art client; I more cared about porting an existing backend. Now after this talk I start wondering: could I achieve both? JOGRE is Java -- Android is Java!

JOGRE builds clients on a regular Java framework with a Swing or AWT based frontend. I am already working on making that client work "on the web", by replacing socket-based messaging with an http protocol. Beyond that, how hard would it be to refactor the client to work on Android backends, rather than regular PCs? Would it be possible to "mobilize" the games with little effort? Imagine having a standard gaming platform for multiplayer games, backed by App Engine and running on your cell phone? How easy would that make writing new online games, and pushing them to the Android marketplace?

So... I guess I've got to ask: any "Android fan" reading this blog who could audit the client side of JOGRE and give me some feedback?