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

Introduction


Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) is a cross-platform industry standard API for producing 2D and 3D graphics. It specifies a language-independent software interface for graphics hardware or software graphics engines. OpenGL ES is a flavor of OpenGL for embedded devices. It consists of a subset of OpenGL specifications and some additional extensions that are specific to OpenGL ES .

OpenGL ES does not require dedicated graphics hardware to work. Different devices can come with graphics hardware with different processing capabilities. The workload of the OpenGL ES calls is divided between the CPU and graphics hardware. It is possible to support OpenGL ES entirely from the CPU. However, graphics hardware can improve performance at different levels, based on its processing capabilities.

Before we dive into Android NDK OpenGL ES, a little introduction of the Graphics Rendering Pipeline (GRP) in the OpenGL context is necessary. GRP refers to a series of processing stages, which the graphics...