[Libreoffice] GSOC 2011 - Android project - pointers ...

[Michael Meeks]

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.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot