

- PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID HOW TO
- PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID FOR MAC OS
- PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID INSTALL
- PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID PORTABLE
- PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID FOR ANDROID
The android command starts the Android SDK and AVD Manager, which is a tool that creates Android emulators for any number of Android virtual devices.

The android tool lets you prepare and run an emulator for any number of the current Android releases, and that's what you do next: $ cd Android/tools $. The adb utility allows you to transfer files to (and from) your Android emulator (more on this utility later). Within the tools directory, only two programs are of interest to you. Pop on over to Google's Android Developer site (see Resources) and grab the latest SDK tarball for Linux.
PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID FOR MAC OS
Downloads of the SDK are available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. With Java in place, it's now time to get the Android SDK.
PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID INSTALL
If you are running a distro that's not derived from Debian, search your software repository for a similar package and install it before proceeding. Xubuntu suggested that I might like to use apt-get to install openjdk-6-jdk, which sounded reasonable to me, so that's what I did: $ sudo apt-get openjdk-6-jdk On my system (running a recent Xubuntu), I entered the following commands and was told neither program was available to me: $ javac -version $ java -version The inclusion of the Android emulator gives you a sandboxed testbed to play in while you create your app.īefore proceeding, you need to make sure a Java VM is installed on your Linux system. Although you aren't going to program your Android app with Java, you still need a Java runtime upon which to execute the Android emulator, which is part of the SDK. To get started, you need a copy of the Android SDK running on your computer, and you need a Java VM. It's true that I'm very much a fan of Perl, but I'm equally comfortable in Python, and, as Python is the SL4A “standard”, I stick with Python throughout this article.
PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID PORTABLE
SL4A's API is designed to be portable across scripting languages, so if you like what you see in this article but wish I'd used Perl instead of Python, the API calls I use here should work exactly as shown with the Perl interpreter. In its default state, SL4A comes pre-installed with a working version of the shell. Python was one of the first languages to be supported on SL4A, but contributed interpreters also are available for Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript and Tcl. SL4A provides a high-level interface to Android's underlying Java technologies, exposing a subset of the API to scripting languages. Damon Kohler works for Google, and he created SL4A to scratch his own itch when it came to programming Android.
PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID FOR ANDROID
The Scripting Layer for Android is one of the many projects to see life as a direct result of Google's policy of allocating 20% of its employees' time to “pet projects”.
PYTHON RUNNER FOR ANDROID HOW TO
In this article, I walk through the steps involved in preparing your computer for Android development with SL4A, then show how to write, test and run a simple script written in Python on your Android device. There's a rather wonderful project called the Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) that is bringing scripting languages to the Android platform and providing a working alternative to Java development. If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code in Eclipse, it would appear that you are out of luck when it comes to implementing your next project on Android. That's great-assuming, of course, you're a fan of Java. Google provides emulator downloads for all the Android platform releases, and there's even a free plugin for Eclipse to start you off and point you in the right direction. All you need is a PC (or laptop) running Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, together with a copy of Java and the free Android SDK.

That said, Google wisely chose the popular Java programming technology upon which to base its Android SDK, which runs a customized VM.īy and large, this has been a smart strategy, as (unlike another popular smartphone) there's no need to own specific hardware and software to get started with app development on Android. However, when it comes to building a “real” Android app, it seems there's only one programming choice: Java (although it is possible with a lot more work to use C/C++ with Android's Native Development Kit). This is no more prevalent than in the Android space where the activity level oftentimes is frenzied. Mobile app development for smartphones is hot.
