Tantalum is a cross-platform Java library that provides a minimal set of functionality to easily create concurrent, networked applications: thread pool, HTTP networking with caching, logging and JSON support from org.json.me library. It’s a rather of a set of common best practices that has been validated to work on both Asha and Android, than a heavyweight compatibility wrapper.
The approach is to strictly separate clean, concurrent, event-driven background application logic from clean, single thread event-driven user interface (UI) code. This way you can achieve the best-possible user experience (UX) on each platform you support by using the best native UI classes while re-using your application logic across all platforms.
“User experience drives good design”, “less is more” and “write it only once” would be the best summary of our guiding philosophy. If fewer lines of code will do the job, that is usually cleaner to maintain and faster to execute. We love lambda expressions and do our best bring this type of modern method-pointer-passing front end architecture with advanced fork-join support to current mobile Java devices. We don’t try to fulfill every conceivable use case, just the most common ones that come up over and over again.
There is no user interface dependency in Tantalum. You can and should strive for professional quality by choosing the best UI available for your purpose on each platform you support, not a least common denominator or technology alien to users’ expectations. You can and should freely extend the library to your specific purpose; that is why it is free and open source. With help from Tantalum you no longer have to do the same boilerplate code for each project, nor do you need to re-write and extensively re-test the code for each platform that you port your code to.
For more information about using Tantalum, see Nokia Asha SDK Help > Tantalum Quick Start Guide.