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android

README.md

Building the Ice for Android Test Suite

This directory contains an Android Studio project for the Ice test suite. For ease of development and testing, this project also builds a subset of the Ice JAR files. This is not necessary for your own projects as it considerably complicates the project configuration.

Building Ice for Java is the only way to build all of the Ice JAR files from source. The JAR files produced by the Ice for Java build fully support Android. If you prefer, our binary distributions include pre-compiled JAR files.

Build Requirements

Android Development Tools

Building any Ice application for Android requires Android Studio and the Android SDK build tools. We tested with the following components:

  • Android Studio 3.0
  • Android SDK 24
  • Android Build Tools 27.0.1

Using Ice's Java mapping with Java 8 requires at minimum API level 24:

  • Android 7 (API24)

If you want to target a later version of the Android API level for the test suite, edit gradle.properties and change the following variables:

ice_compileSdkVersion
ice_minSdkVersion
ice_targetSdkVersion

NOTE: Do not use Android Studio to modify the project's settings.

Slice to Java Compiler

To build this project you'll need the Slice to Java compiler, which generates Java code from Slice definitions. The compiler is written in C++. If you have a suitable C++ development environment, you can build Ice for C++ yourself. Otherwise, you can obtain the compiler by installing a binary distribution.

The project's Gradle-based build system will automatically search for the compiler in this repository and in the default installation directories used by the binary distributions for our supported platforms.

Bzip2 Compression

Ice for Java supports protocol compression using the bzip2 classes included with Apache Commons Compress.

The Maven package id for the commons-compress JAR file is as follows:

groupId=org.apache.commons, version=1.14, artifactId=commons-compress

The demos and tests are automatically setup to enable protocol compression by adding the commons-compress JAR to the manifest class path. For your own applications you must add the commons-compress JAR to the application CLASSPATH to enable protocol compression.

These classes are a pure Java implementation of the bzip2 algorithm and therefore add significant latency to Ice requests.

Building the Project

Follow these steps to open the project in Android Studio:

  1. Start Android Studio
  2. Select "Open an existing Android Studio project"
  3. Navigate to and select the "android" subdirectory
  4. Click OK and wait for the project to open and build

The Android Studio project contains a testController application for the Ice test suite. To run the application, select it in the configuration pull down and run it.

Running the Test Suite

To run the test suite you need to add the tools and platform-tools directories of Android SDK to the PATH.

On macOS you can use the following command:

export PATH=~/Library/Android/sdk/tools:~/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools:$PATH

On Windows you can use the following command:

set PATH=%LOCALAPPDATA%\Android\sdk\tools;%LOCALAPPDATA%\Android\sdk\platform-tools;%PATH%

The Instant Run feature of Android Studio causes some problems with the test suite application and you need to disable it in order to run the test controller application from Android Studio. Check the following page for instructions on disabling it:

https://developer.android.com/studio/run/index.html#disable-ir

Start the testController application from Android Studio and once it has started, run the testsuite by using the allTests.py script:

cd android
python allTests.py

This will try to run the testsuite on the connected device. If there are multiple devices connected to this machine you can use the --device argument to select a device:

python allTests.py --device=ZX1C2234XF

You can see the list of connected devices with the adb command:

adb devices -l

If you are running the application on an emulator, you must pass the --androidemulator command line option:

python allTests.py --androidemulator --device=emulator-5554

You can also start the emulator from the allTests.py script:

python allTests.py --androidemulator --avd=Nexus_6P_API_25 --controller-app

Where --avd is set to the Android emulator image you want to use. You can list the available image names in your host by using emulator -list-avds. Images can be created using Android Studio.