note: This repository is archived and development / support is discontinued.
This project aims to convert project files from MIT's Scratch (v1.4) programming environment into Android applications.
Please note that this is currently in very early development, and is little more than a proof of concept at present. Only a subset of Scratch is supported.
This software is Copyright © Ross Bamford (& contributors) and is Open Source software licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See the included LICENSE file for more details.
To build Android projects from your Scratch projects, the following are required dependencies:
- Apache Ant version 1.5 or higher (Recommended 1.6+).
- Android SDK for building your generated projects.
The following, although not required, are highly recommended as they will make building and deploying your projects much easier:
- Eclipse IDE (Recommend Eclipse Juno)
- Android ADT for Eclipse
Please note that, at present, ScratchToAndroid is not a "one-stop" solution for building Android applications from your Scratch projects. If you are not comfortable using the tools mentioned above, then you are quite likely to run into problems. Please do not request support for such issues from the Scratch2Android authors.
Android projects are generated from the included template project using Apache Ant. If you are running Linux (or possibly Mac OS X) a bash wrapper script is included that will take care of running Ant for you, passing in the appropriate options. An example command:
$ ./generate -i samples/simple3.sb -n Simple3 -p com.roscopeco.scratch.sample3
An explanation of the options can be found by running generate with a single -h option.
If you are on Windows, you will have to run Ant manually, passing in the options as properties. The equivalent of the above command would be:
c:\> ant -buildfile generate.xml -DSCRATCHFILE=samples\simple3.sb -DPROJECTNAME=Simple3 -DPKG=com.roscopeco.scratch.simple3
These commands will generate a zipped Eclipse project in the current directory, named <projectname>.zip (e.g. in the examples above, Simple3.zip would be created). This can be directly imported into Eclipse with the following steps:
- Select File -> Import...
- Under General, select Existing projects into workspace.
- Ensure the Archive file option is checked, and enter (or browse for the Zip file created by the generator).
- Ensure that the project is checked in the main part of the dialog (it will be by default), and click Finish.
- Your new Android project is now ready to build and deploy!
Please note that the above instructions are for Eclipse Juno. The procedure varies slightly on other version of Eclipse.
A small number of sample Scratch projects are included with the distribution, in the samples directory. These Scratch projects do not make use of any features that are not currently supported by the Android runtime. Please note that they do not (yet) all function correctly.
This project depends on the ScratchFileReader and ScratchToJava projects. The requisite Jars are included in the gen-lib directory for convenience. If you wish to update them, you will need to check out both projects and use their Ant build scripts to generate new Jars. In this case, you'll also need to place the updated scratchtojava-runtime-VERSION.jar in the libs/ directory.