14 DAY TRIAL // Mountain View-based Internet giant Google has made available for download last month a new flavor of their Android NDK, namely revision 5, which accompanied the new Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform flavor and which, according to the company, can offer developers the possibility to come up with awesome applications. The first release of the Android NDK was put online back in July of 2009 as a development toolchain for building shared libraries in C or C++ to be used in conjunction with Android applications built in Java.
“Since that initial release we’ve steadily improved support for native code; key features such as OpenGL ES support, debugging capabilities, multiple ABI support, and access to bitmaps in native code have arrived with each NDK revision,” Google's Tim Bray notes on Android Developers.
“The result has been pretty awesome: we’ve seen huge growth in certain categories of performance-critical applications, particularly 3D games. […] With the latest version of the NDK we intend to further increase the awesomeness of your applications, this time by a pretty big margin.”
The new NDK r5 comes with a series of new APIs that should offer developers the possibility to do more from native code.
Moreover, the applications that were built for Gingerbread could be implemented entirely in C++, which means that developers would be able to come up with Android software without writing a single line of Java.
“Of course, access to the regular Android API still requires Dalvik, and the VM is still present in native applications, operating behind the scenes,” the said post continues. However, those who would like to do more than what the NDK offers can invoke Dalvik methods via JNI.
The new NDK release comes with other options as well, including the possibility to play sound from native code, handle common application events, control windows directly, manage EGL contexts, and read assets directly out of APK files.
There is also a version of STLport pre-built with the latest NDK, to enable an easier delivery of STL-reliant applications for Android.
“Finally, r5 adds backwards-compatible support for RTTI, C++ exceptions, wchar_t, and includes improved debugging tools. Clearly, this release represents a large positive ∆awesome,” the said post continues.