Hi Maxime,
On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 23:13 -0400, Maxime Côté wrote:
> My name is Maxime Côté, I'm a student from Québec. I'm interested in
> participating in the GSOC this year with LibreOffice. To be more
> precise I'm interested in porting it to Android as I already have good
> knowledge of Java, C++ and a basic knowledge of Android, but I really
> want to learn more about it and the same goes for LibreOffice.
Wonderful ! :-)
> Now what I would like to know is, could JNI (Java Native Interface) be
> use to interface with the core library
Well - I assume we should use the Android NDK:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html
Personally (what with time-to-market etc.) I think we should target the
latest android API version - ie. API level 9 - which gives us a lot of
nice (pre-wrapped) C APIs for talking to the system.
Sadly these seem hard to browse on-line ;-) but if you poke around in
the downloaded SDK from above:
platforms/android-9/arch-arm/usr/include/android/bitmap.h
eg. - I guess a start would be digging around and writing a little code
to convert a LibreOffice basebmp/ BitmapDevice into an android
equivalent.
Hopefully that handles much of the rendering ;-) Then of course we will
need the critical main-loop integration, to hook the Android loop into
VCL's - ie.
platforms/android-9/arch-arm/usr/include/android/looper.h
And, I would copy the approach used in the gtk+ integration (with the
glib mainloop g_main_context etc.) work - should be easy to spot
the_underscore_glib_methods vs. TheStdlCaps LibreOffice ones :-) that
code is in vcl/unx/gtk/app/gtkdata.cxx
> or you see something else, what exactly will need to be ported. Also
> I would like to know where do I start in LibreOffice's code, where
> could I begin hacking to help me understand the code that will need
> porting.
Sure - so I think the first thing to do, is to get a build, and to
submit your first simple easy hack :-) that should give a flavour for
how LibreOffice is to work on cf.
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks
Also, in part the build process checks out and downloads the full
source tree, which will take some time.
The code to start digging at is in vcl/ - in particular:
vcl/unx/headless/svpgdi*
which -should- already implement much of the code to do our backend
rendering to bitmaps [ which is what we'll need for Android I think ].
That uses the code in basebmp/ extensively, and may need some
improvement (of course), as well as sub-classing for Android [ and the
web project - hopefully if we get someone for that too, there is some
shared overlap here :-].
So - I hope those are enough pointers to get started in the research.
It is certainly an exciting project to consider :-)
ATB,
Michael.
--
michael.me...@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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