At JavaOne San Francisco 2013 Ryan Cuprak, Bala Muthuvarathan and I presented a full-house session titled Android and iOS Development with Java EE 7. Ryan is the leader of the Connecticut JUG, a close friend and my co-author on the upcoming second edition of EJB 3 in Action. Bala is a friend and former colleague from CapTech Consulting. We picked the topic as we thought there was surprisingly little content on the topic despite the fact that many people use JAX-RS/Java EE as a mobile back-end platform today and Java EE 7 is an even stronger candidate for this development model. You can check out video for the event below. The demo code for the session is available on GitHub and the slide deck is available on SlideShare. One of the surprising things we came across is that Android still has very weak support for WebSocket development. As a result, I thought it would be great if the WebSocket client APIs standardized in Java EE 7 would work on Android, so I entered a JIRA issue against Tyrus asking for such support.
Some of you might be very pleasantly surprised that the Tyrus team actually addressed the issue! You can read the details of the initial work on Pavel Bucek's blog, including a sample application. If you find the feature useful, I would encourage you to explore the work further, share your thoughts on the Tyrus mailing list or via JIRA. You could even contribute to the sample code for the JavaOne talk :-) (currently the code uses the Autobahn Android library).