SuperWaba

It works on PalmOS & Windows CE devices, is fully emulated under Java, and even runs in web browsers that support Java.

SuperWaba has support for :

• Exceptions
• Threads
• complete set of UI controls
• double and long numeric types
• variable resolution devices
• grayscale and color displays
• sockets, serial/IR & Bluetooth
• XML and HTML parsing
• fonts
• game API
• Native libraries

A huge range of additional controls, methods, applications, tools and development environments are available from http://www.superwaba.com.br/en/listaProgramas.asp as well as it being compatible with well-known packages such as Eclipse, Netbeans, JBuilder and so forth.

The Executive Summary

In short, SuperWaba runs on Palm, WinCE, PocketPC, Windows and Java machines. Lots of people use it. By writing your code in SuperWaba, you can ship it into all of these markets simultaneously. It being Open Source, you can change it to support unique features of unusual devices and extend the wide range of libraries available. Is there any reason not to use SuperWaba? We don't think so.

There are many libraries available for SuperWaba to extend its basic functionality. To provide floating point support, for example, or to import images. Some are free, some not so free. Sample code is available to show you how to write your own, so if SuperWaba does not support a feature of your device you may add it yourself. Guich also sells a tutorial on the subject.

How does it work?

It interprets Java-compatible bytecode. Interpreters are often thought of as slow, but SuperWaba has very slick performance and outpaces Sun's JIT-compiled Java on similar platforms. Work is in progress on making SuperWaba work with the hardwired Java in the ARM Xscale CPUs used in newer Palm and PocketPC devices. This will offer truly impressive Java performance.

Meanwhile, in the real world, expect SuperWaba programs to run at roughly a third of the speed as a hand-cut 'C' version of the same thing. As long as you remember that you're not developing on a desktop PC, this is not a problem. But both SuperWaba and CPUs seem to be constantly improving, so you can get away with it more often these days. We're now starting to see playable games with sizeable graphics being developed, and have developed a gaming API.

How you use it

You download it from here, which will require a free and unintrusive registration. Installing on a Palm requires the copying of a few files, but there is an installation script for WinCE and PocketPC devices in the downloaded ZIP file:
SuperWabaSDK/lib/ce/_CEinstall-RunMe.bat

Download one or two of the many free applications, drag the files into your PDA and off you go. More instructions are in SuperWabaSDK/docs/SuperWaba.pdf which you can read online.