Re: new to group, request clarifications

[Ivan Vučica]

On Tue Dec 24 2013 at 8:38:59 AM, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:

 
3)  The Droidstep thing sounded interesting.  I assume it was designed to let you
      use GNUstep to write applications for Android smartphones.  Too bad it appears
      to be dead.  Has anyone done any experimentation in this area?  Any ideas on how 
      difficult it would be to do such a thing?

I think nobody did know about it and since there was never any source published by the initiator nobody has

done any tests.

Generally, since Android is Linux + some user space apps (some parts written in C++ and apps written in Java),

you would need to develop/install at least:

* libobj for Android

* base + GUI

* a backend that harmonizes with the frame buffer based Android graphics (e.g. toolbar, popup menus etc,)

* find a mechanism to deploy apps not packed as .apk

So it might be easier to install a Debian on your Android device and then use what already exists.

Last time I worked on an Android one-command build script was in May 2013, so the situation may have changed, but we need a few patches.

See:

  http://bitbucket.org/ivucica/gnustep-android

I have not completed my work, though, so some work on this is still needed.

I planned to play only with gnustep-make and gnustep-base, as anything more would require writing a gnustep-gui backend and would probably not result in very useful applications. For porting games that don't use AppKit apart from NSOpenGLView and UIKit apart from CAEAGLLayer (or use them minimally), and that could be transitioned to OpenGL ES easily, having at least gnustep-base could help.