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Google's Android gets native development capabilities
- From: Brian Warkoczeski
- Date: Fri Jun 26 12:05:59 2009
Google's Android gets native development capabilities
By Paul Krill
www.yahoo.com
June 26, 2009
San Francisco -Google moved to boost its Android mobile device software
platform this week by offering developers a kit that enables them to
call native code from Android applications.
Android 1.5 Native Development Kit (NDK), Release 1 allows developers to
implement parts of applications using native languages including C and
C++. Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine, which is
Google's own software for running Java and serves as Android's primary
runtime.
The native kit is a companion to the Android SDK.
"Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android
applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits
against its drawbacks, which are numerous," according to a post in the
Android blog. "Your application will be more complicated, have reduced
compatibility, have no access to framework APIs and be harder to debug.
That said, some applications that have self-contained, CPU-intensive
operations that don't allocate much memory may still benefit from
increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code."
Applications that are good candidates for the NDK include signal
processing and physics simulation.
Also featured in the NDK is a way to embed corresponding native
libraries into application package files that can be run on Android
devices. Native system headers and libraries will be supported in future
releases of the Android platform.
The 1.5 release of the kit supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set.
Android is a project of the Open Handset Alliance, featuring Google.
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