
Google Open Source Blog: Introducing Android Scripting Environment - Anon84
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.html
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inc
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.

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dflock
Time to finally get a new phone, methinks.

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sketerpot
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#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#Hardware_products_running_Android)

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callahad
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.

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davidw
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.

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ianbishop
Does anything like this exist on the iPhone/Pre?

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jodrellblank
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.

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nileshk
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?

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Zaak
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.

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buugs
I kind of really want an android phone now.

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joshsharp
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.

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davidw
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.

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pavlov
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?

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

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pavlov
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.

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Andys
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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martey
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._

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Andys
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.

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

