Creating iPhone Apps Without a Mac
Creating applications for the iPhone requires a machine capable of running the iPhone SDK app development environment. Despite Apple providing a free, full-featured copy of its developer tools to make every single user of Mac OS X a potential developer and Macs being competitive with most PCs in terms or price, there are still many developers looking to enter the world of iPhone app creation without learning Objective-C or using Xcode. One such group is generating a great deal of interest from the open source community, as well as JAVA programmers. Circumventing the problem of development of a virtual machine for the iPhone, the project XMLVM allows developers to cross-compile a Java application to Objective-C and execute it on an iPhone. Of course in order to get applications to run on a real device, you still require a Mac and Xcode in order to properly sign the applications using Apple’s code-signing tools. Without the code-signing step, applications will not run on normally provisioned (i.e. non jail-break) devices.
Related Links:
- SourceForge: XMLVM
- Developing iPhone Applications using Java
- Open Source iPhone Dev: XML to the Rescue?
