kristianlm / chicken-apk

Chicken on Android using apk-templates

CHICKEN Android Template

This project aims to make Android development with Chicken Scheme easier. There have been numerous prior attempts at this as this process is considerably clunkier than it should be. Typically,

1. You need to start off with an Android skeleton
2. You need basic JNI interface
3. The natvie side must initialize the CHICKEN runtime properly (and set repository-home)
4. You have to prefix all .so files under libs/ with lib
5. You must generally cross-compile CHICKEN (for each ARCH)
6. You must cross-compile the eggs (for each ARCH)
7. You must cross-compile your own user code (for each ARCH)

This project tries to address 1-6 for you. The approach is perhaps a little radical, and totally stoken from GoDot: We build a single Android app (template.apk) and reuse this for all Chicken projects on Android. We replace the native parts of the template (replacing/adding .so files) with our own Chicken native part and then modify the package name in the manifest (TODO).

template

The template is the Android app that's intended to be reused for each Chicken Android project.

It currently only has one activity: a REPL interface that interacts with stdin/stdout. Think of this as a poor implementation of a terminal emulator. This template could in the future also have an SDL2 activity for more serious Chicken apps.

The idea is that the template has an Activity for everything you need, and you remove the ones you don't want at build-time (modify maniffest still TODO).

To simplify things, this first build stage have been split up and does not know anything about Chicken. If you don't need to modify (or more likely, fix) the template, you don't need to build this part. If you do, this stage needs both the Android SDK and the Android NDK.

chicken-egg

This part of the project provides tools to work with apk files. It lets you re-compress an .apk into a new one, modifying the AndroidManifest.xml and adding .so in the process. Unfortunately, modifying the AndroidManifest.xml is extremely complicated because it involves a poorly documented binary XML format with even less documented semantics (what is the resource-pool, anyone?).

The modules from this is needed by app-native. It is not needed in the target app.

app-native

This part takes the template and fills it up with Chicken eggs, using a cross Chicken for each ARCH (arm7, x86 etc). It needs the Android NDK, but not the Android SDK, and uses Docker to acheive this.