[Mobile-sig] Experiments with Dalvik

[Russell Keith-Magee]

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 6:06 AM, David Boddie <david at boddie.org.uk> wrote:

> On 2016-05-17 23:04, Russell Keith-Magee wrote:
>
> This is a really interesting approach - thanks for sharing.
>>
>
> You're welcome. I hope it helps to provide new insights into the other
> approaches people are taking.
>
> I’ve been doing something similar recently with VOC [1]. I’m
>> targetting Java bytecode rather than Dalvik, but with a similar end
>> goal: to take Python source code, and deploy it to Android as a native
>> application without needing to use the Android NDK. A couple of weeks
>> ago I published a video showing a native iOS, Android and single-page
>> web app, all doing the same thing running on Python [2], using this
>> toolchain (plus some other tools).
>>
>
> That should be interesting to see. I don't have much time to look at it
> this week, but I'll try to make some time after the weekend.


If you’re coming to PyCon US, I’ll be speaking about this work. If you’re
not… well.. the videos will be online shortly after, I suppose :-)


> Of course, you’ve got the added bonus that you don’t need the
>> Android SDK either, which would be a huge win in my book. What’s the
>> impact of Android’s move to ART on this approach?
>>
>
> The first thing I checked was whether ART makes work done for Dalvik
> obsolete. According to the following document, it shouldn't have any
> obvious effect: both use Dex files and Dex bytecode.
>
> https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/index.html
>
> If I was writing anything complex enough then perhaps I would run into
> differences. Currently, I'm testing on a fairly old Android device.
>
> I may well buy something running an up-to-date version to test on, and
> a tablet might be interesting given that I don't really want to start
> collecting phones. I'd be interested in receiving suggestions for any
> that are reasonably priced, have unlockable bootloaders, and whose
> manufacturers supply the source code that they are supposed to for
> system components. I realise that I may have narrowed the field a bit
> with those requirements. ;-)


My current test setup is a Nexus 5 I inherited from my father-in-law, plus
an older Kogan Agora phone:

https://www.kogan.com/au/kogan/shop/phones/android/

(That’s the Australian store;
The Kogan phones are the usual “cheap manufacture and rebrand” devices -
the same device is sold by a couple of other companies in Australia under
different brand names. For the price, they’re pretty good as test devices.
They don’t make a big deal about getting access to the boot loader and
system software, but I know some people at Kogan, and they’re generally
sympathetic to FOSS (they’re a well known Django shop); I’ll give them a
poke and see what they say about releasing technical details.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mobile-sig/attachments/20160519/54292789/attachment.html>