Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Do Androids dream of wxWidgets?


Don't know about androids to be honest but I'd definitely love to be able to develop applications using wxWidgets that could run on both iPhone (which is already kind of possible) and Android and also reuse at least parts of their code with desktop versions. Unfortunately Android doesn't exactly encourage developing in C++ but things seem to be slowly moving in the right direction and the last NDK release allows to implement GUI applications entirely in C++ by providing the new NativeActivity class.



There is still no convenient access to native widgets but we can use Java classes from C++ code via JNI and we could even automatically wrap them using something like JCC. So at least in principle it seems that there are no obstacles to implementing a working wxAndroid port. And at least wxUniversal could be ported without using JNI at all and just using OpenGL for drawing.



All we need right now are the volunteers (and/or donations...) to make it happen. For me personally it would be one of the most interesting things to do after releasing wxWidgets 3.0.

3 comments:

zooplah said...

This is really odd. Everything on Android has to be Java? That's the only thing I can make out of this article, as Mac has never encouraged the use of C++ either (Pascal on classic Mac; Objective-C on OS X).

Unknown said...

Is the Android 'port' still in progress? I am interested in volunteering. My email is toomayt@toomaytech.com
Regards
Tim

VZ said...

We'd still very much like to have such port but nobody is actively working on it AFAIK. Please see the previous discussions about it on wx-dev mailing list and post there if you'd like to work on it.