Book Image

Android Native Development Kit Cookbook

By : Liu Feipeng
Book Image

Android Native Development Kit Cookbook

By: Liu Feipeng

Overview of this book

Building Android applications would usually mean that you spend all of your time working in Java. There are however times when this is not the most efficient or best method for the application being built. This is where Android NDK comes in. Android NDK allows the developer to write in Native C/C++, giving you the power to reuse code and libraries and also, in most cases, increase the speed and efficiency of your application.The "Android Native Development Kit Cookbook" will help you understand the development, building, and debugging of your native Android applications. We will discover and learn JNI programming and essential NDK APIs such as OpenGL ES, and the native application API. We will then explore the process of porting existing libraries and software to NDK. By the end of this book you will be able to build your own apps in NDK apps."Android Native Development Kit Cookbook" begins with basic recipes that will help you in the building and debugging of native apps, and JNI programming. The recipes cover various topics of application development with Android NDK such as OpenGL programming and Multimedia programming. We will begin with a simple recipe, Hello NDK, before moving on to cover advanced topics with recipes on OpenGL ES that focus on 2D and 3D graphics, as well as recipes that discuss working with NDK and external APIs. If you are looking for ways to make your application available in Android and take measures to boost your application's performance, then this Cookbook is for you.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Android Native Development Kit Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up an Android NDK development environment in Mac OS


This recipe describes how to set up an Android NDK development environment in Mac OS.

Getting ready

Android development requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher, and it works on the x86 architecture only. Ensure that your machine meets these requirements before getting started.

Register an Apple developer account, then go to https://developer.apple.com/xcode/ to download Xcode, which contains a lot of developer tools, including the make utility required for Android NDK development. After the download is complete, run the installation package and make sure that the UNIX Development option is selected for installation.

As usual, Java JDK 6 or above is required. Mac OS X usually ships with a full JDK. We can verify that your machine has the required version by using the following command:

$javac -version

How to do it…

Setting up an Android NDK development environment on Mac OS X is similar to setting it up on Ubuntu Linux. The following steps explain how we can do this:

  1. Follow steps 1 to 6 of the Setting up an Android NDK development environment in Windows recipe to install the ADT plugin for Eclipse.

  2. Download Android SDK from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html, then extract the downloaded package.

  3. Append the following lines to ~/.profile. If the file doesn't exist, create a new one. Save the changes and log out of the current session:

    export ANDROID_SDK=<path to Android SDK directory>
    export PATH=$PATH:$ ANDROID_SDK/tools:$ANDROID_SDK/platform-tools
  4. In Eclipse, select Eclipse | Preferences to open the Preferences window. Select Android from the left panel, then click on Browse to locate the Android SDK root directory. Click on Apply, and then OK.

  5. In a terminal, start the Android SDK Manager at the tools directory by typing the command android. Select Android SDK Tools, Android SDK Platform-tools, at least one Android platform (the latest one is preferred), System Image, SDK Samples, and Android Support. Then click on Install. In the next window, read and accept all the license agreements, then click on Install.

  6. Download Android SDK from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html, and then extract the downloaded package.

  7. Change the lines that you appended to ~/.profile in step 3:

    export ANDROID_SDK=<path to Android SDK directory>
    export ANDROID_NDK=<path to Android NDK directory> 
    export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_SDK/tools:$ANDROID_SDK/platform-tools:$ANDROID_NDK
  8. Start a new terminal, then go to the samples/hello-jni directory in NDK. Type the command ndk-build. If the build is successful, it proves that the NDK environment is set up correctly.

How it works…

The steps to set up an Android NDK development environment on Mac OS X are similar to Ubuntu Linux, since both of them are Unix-like operating systems. We first installed Android SDK, then Android NDK.