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


There are many C/C++ libraries for the Desktop computing world. These libraries can save us a huge amount of effort if we can reuse them on an Android platform. Android NDK makes this possible. In this chapter, we will discuss how to port the existing libraries to Android with NDK.

We will first introduce how to build libraries with the Android NDK build system. We can build a library as a static library module or a shared library module. The differences between the two will be discussed in this chapter.

We can also use the Android NDK toolchain as a standalone cross compiler, which is covered next. We will then describe how to use the compiled libraries as prebuilt modules.

We often use the same library in multiple Android projects. We can use the import-module feature to link to the same library module to multiple projects while maintaining a single copy of the library.

Many C++ libraries require STL, C++ exceptions, and Run-Time Type Information (RTTI) supports, which are not...