Google Open Source Blog: Introducing Android Scripting Environment | Hacker News Reader

Google Open Source Blog: Introducing Android Scripting Environment

google-opensource.blogspot.com

81 pointsAnon8429 comments

This is great. I remember writing games as a kid on a pocket computer during long car rides. Imagine being a kid today, with all these great toys.

Time to finally get a new phone, methinks.

I'm waiting for some more Android phones to become available, so I'll have more choice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#...

I picked up a Dev Phone 1 (G1 / HTC Dream) last week, knowing full well that more refined devices are in the pipeline. I'll probably replace it for day to day usage in the not so distant future, but it'll stay relevant as a lowest common denominator for app development and testing.

I recently got the HTC Magic (G2). It's pretty sweet. The battery life is good, too. It lasts me all day with heavy use.

I'm waiting for the OpenPandora, http://openpandora.org/

Well, that sort of blows the raison d'etre for Hecl's Android port out of the water, but it's really cool to see nonetheless, and one of the reasons why Android is a great platform for those who want to hack on stuff.

Actually, I think Hecl will still be useful for some things: it compiles directly to dalvik bytecode, whereas these are native processes which are launched/managed/interacted with via jsonrpc.

Does anything like this exist on the iPhone/Pre?

The iPhone EULA (or maybe app store agreements) prohibit scripting and interpreting, but if you have a jailbroken one you can install Python (search for Python in Cydia).

Coding using the iPhone keyboard isn't much fun, and as it's unsupported there are limited APIs - but there is a Python/Objective-C package, and a sample GUI app which loads a long list from a data provider (with full scrolling), and with a jailbroken phone and SSH, you can upload and edit remotely and so on.

I wish the iPhone supported Bluetooth keyboards (or some form of external keyboard). It would make using SSH and such much more pleasant. Maybe someone will use the external peripheral framework in OS 3.0 to add an external keyboard. I've seen one hack that did add a keyboard.

Does either of the Android phones support Bluetooth keyboards?

Android doesn't yet support the bluetooth profile you'd need to pair with a keyboard. I hope that full bluetooth support will be in an Android update later this year, but I don't think anything definite has been announced.

PhoneGap will let let you develop with HTML/Javascript/CSS, but compile to native code. That's the closest I know of. Bonus: it will also compile to android (basically a webkit wrapper).

Titanium mobile, beta was just released today http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile/

I kind of really want an android phone now.

I really thought that they'd make versions of these languages that would compile to Dalvik bytecode, so that people weren't restricted to writing Java Android apps. Makes sense given it's a custom VM, right? Guess we're halfway there now.

I think you could definitely do that with Lua (I know someone has ported it to J2ME), and Javascript. Python and Ruby are harder, because they are bigger, and their Java implementations use lots of more 'advanced' stuff like reflection and bytecode generation that are not going to fly on Dalvik.

Hmm. Python has been available for Symbian/S60 for at least five years. Surely there are interactive scripting environments on Windows Mobile as well. What makes ASE special?

Every time some new project comes along, the "what makes this project special" inevitably appears.

In this case, shouldn't it be "What makes Android special?", since ASE is a complementary addition?

Can you write Python/S60 programs on the phone's keyboard? (Honestly, I don't know)

I haven't tried it, but I don't see why not... The project's feature list mentions that there's a console for interactive development.

Of course Symbian is one of those old-fashioned operating systems with a user-accessible file system, so one can also just open a text editor, write a script, save it as a file and run it the PyS60 script shell.

Yes you can. It's a normal python interpreter.

Anyone having trouble installing this on a G1? I am getting "not enough space" messages upon download, even though I have >50MB free on the phone.

Worked for me. I'm on Cupcake. Not sure how much space I had before the install, but after it I have 7MB left.

Yes, I got it to work by rebooting the phone (eek!)

Whole thing takes about 12MB after install, much bigger than any other app.

Wow, that's huge. Ok, now I'm not feeling quite so bad about Hecl.

Well if they give an easy way to deploy it this could be fun.

I get the impression that this is for prototyping as opposed to a new way to create applications.

ASE lets you develop on the device itself using high-level scripting languages to try out your idea now, in the situation where you need it, quickly.

It would be possibly to make them deployable, but use of an application would require pre-installation of the rather hefty SDK install.

Kind of like a ".NET" scenario.

The easier it is to deploy applications, and the more options available the better. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com