What Is Codename One

The signup for the private beta of Codename One is now complete, thank you all for the great response to this. You should receive an email within 24 hours regarding your signup status (assuming you signed up). 

Codename One is a cross device platform allowing you to write your code once in Java and have it work on all devices specifically: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 & J2ME devices. The biggest goals for the project are ease of use/RAD (rapid application development), deep integration with the native platform & native speed.

To achieve this we looked at the pain points and missing elements within the current environments and added/refined the elements we think are missing. We used the portability experience of LWUIT to effectively reinvent Java programming for mobile devices and still allow full access to the underlying OS including embedding native components in place.

The Codename One solution consists of the following parts:

• Codename One API - a Swing like API geared for mobile devices with support for IO, GPS, Media/Camera etc. The UI/IO portions of the Codename One API are based on LWUIT which is highly optimized to mobile device development, multi-resolution and multi-DPI programming.
  
• Native Themes - Codename One ships with native device themes that are implicitly set to a project to ease the integration with the native OS.
  
• NetBeans/Eclipse plugins - for the beta period we will focus mostly on NetBeans support but the intention is to provide a choice of IDE's. The plugin allows easy development without requiring any additional installations of device emulators or platforms.
  
• Simulator environment - Codename One provides a FAST, easy to use and flexible simulator environment to simulate common devices on the market. This environment is highly pluggable and extensible allowing the community to quickly pick it up.
  
• Codename One Designer - GUI builder, theme creator, localization tool and generally the Swiss army knife of Codename. It allows drag and drop application creation as well as unique features such as live preview of the GUI on an actual device.
  
• Build Server - its remarkably hard to get a device build working on one platform and getting it working on 6 (RIM is effectively 2 or even 3 platforms) is one of the hardest things in device programming. Codename One offers a cloud service to seamlessly build your applications for free. You can always compile them locally and avoid the cloud service entirely, that is pretty difficult to accomplish in comparison it also requires a Mac for iPhone builds and Windows for RIM/Windows Phone 7 builds.
  
• Cloud services - Codename One offers cloud services ranging from crash protection to on device debugging and access to web services, push notification, location etc.

I'm hoping you have lots of questions and feedback to give so please provide it in the comments section bellow. I will try to update the FAQ with answers  to all the questions.