Vendor EclipseSource has unveiled a new cross-platform mobile development toolkit it calls Tabris 1.0. According to the company, it’s “the first Java toolkit for the cross-platform development of native mobile apps.” It currently supports iOS and Android, and a Windows RT version is in the works.
“Tabris sits on top of Eclipse RAP,” explained EclipseSource’s Holger Staudacher. “RAP provides a UI Toolkit to write Web applications using Java. This UI toolkit is based on widgets, so you don’t have to mess around with HTML. To be able to display those widgets in a browser, RAP uses a protocol which is based on JSON [JavaScript Object Notation]. Within this protocol are messages that instruct the browser, e.g., to display a button, or a tree, and so on. What Tabris does is to provide two alternative clients which are an iOS and an Android client. Those clients simply understand the RAP protocol messages and display widgets using the native counterparts.”
