Re: [Vala] Vala to Android

[tarnyko tarnyko net]

Thanks Tal, 

To be totally honest, I heavily relied on this clever guy's mail :
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2011-March/msg00096.html 

However, his work was not fully explained, some errors here, some patches & 
switches missing there... so I worked hard until I got these d*mn binaries 
:-). And then, you had the Vala part of course, but I begin to be 
experienced there (see former posts about cross-compilation on my blog). 

Now, to go further on this subject : 

- Android's windowing system is called SurfaceFlinger. It's far different 
from X11/Wayland, and exposes fast no pure C apis ; however you can draw on 
it using JNI. 

Porting GTK+ to it would be a HUGE work, involving many and more experienced 
hackers than I am ;-), so we better find a sponsor for that. QT has already 
done that (google for "Necessitas"). GTK+ is mostly pushed by RedHat, who 
has shown no interest in mobile devices yet ; Canonical is pushing in this 
direction though, but don't they already have a home-made API for their 
Ubuntu Tablet stuff ? (need some facts here). 

- If we cannot find a sponsor, we can still write a Vala wrapper for simpler 
libraries like this one (S4L) :
http://credentiality2.blogspot.gr/2010/08/giving-native-android-c-apps-acces 
s-to.html 

So it would end to be an Android-specific Vala binding ; but it's not so 
bad, you'd need to rewrite your GUI even on QT either, as the screen is lot 
smaller and due to mobile-specific ergonomics. 

I'm playing with Cairo right now. It's not so hard, good for pure bitmap 
operations ; not bad for a start :-) ! 

PS Tal : the mail about GLib was already posted on gtk-list years ago, so I 
better not forward this until I have new stuff. 

Regards,
Tarnyko 

Tal Hadad writes: 

> Very good!
> someone had to break his mind until this would success, and you and many others volunteered... 
>
> The main problem was GObject and GLib, I think it would interest people in other GNOME mailing list. 
>
> I recently also tried myself to find ways to use Vala in Android, and you prove it works! 
>
> This also should be a great start for GTK in android, QT is ahead in this race. 
>
> Tal 
>
> > From: tarnyko tarnyko net
> > To: vala-list gnome org
> > Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:05:47 +0100
> > Subject: Re: [Vala] Vala to Android 
> >
> > Nice, thank you very much !  
> >
> > Regards,
> > Tarnyko  
> >
> > Luca Bruno writes:
> > > 
> > > Thanks for your contribution. I've reported it here fyi:
> > > http://valajournal.blogspot.it/2013/03/vala-on-android.html 
> > > 
> > > Best regards, 
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > www.debian.org - The Universal Operating System
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