BOINC on Android via the NDK

[Carl C]

Hi, just to have a "placeholder" for my idea/project for discussion
etc -- my plan over the next few months is to use the Android NDK
(Native Development Kit) to compile BOINC and the necessary libraries
(i.e. libcurl) using the "native" C++ (i.e. rather than converting
big bits to Java for Android etc).

The NDK looks pretty promising, of course it came much later than Oded
et al's work on boincoid. The basic idea is to create a BOINC GUI in
Android that can call the relevant BOINC executable (boinc_cmd) via
JNI (Java Native Interface) to the C++ libraries (so obviously I will
have to wrap a lot of boinc_cmd functionality into some library
routines I can call).

[Eric J Korpela]

You might also want to look at JNative (on sourceforge, IIRC) that
gets rid of some of the JNI complexity when accessing functions in a
shared library. Not sure if android apps can include a .so, but since
linux system functions live in known shared libraries it might be
useful for those.

I haven't looked at how the NDK handles binaries for different Android
platforms, although I suppose most every target is ARM of some flavor.

Eric