ScriptBasic for Android

[Support]

Kent,

Thanks for helping out the ScriptBasic project and your feedback is much appreciated. I would venture to say there is still more fun still to come as this project materializes. You're a OxygenBasic fan and now a SB user. You may want to try creating one of your own extension modules with O2 for SB. I hope to get a fixed (sub/function looping issue) Android version soon.

John

[Support]

If you’re a challenger to the Android-Apple tag team these IDC standings are simply depressing.

Windows Mobile/Windows Phone has yet to make significant inroads in the worldwide smartphone market, but 2012 should be considered a ramp-up year for Nokia and Microsoft to boost volumes. Until Nokia speeds the cadence of its smartphone releases or more vendors launch their own Windows Phone-powered smartphones, IDC anticipates slow growth for the operating system.

With Android owning more then half the market, scripting phones/tablets (local and remote) may make ScriptBasic more attractive.

Even on my old Acer Aspire 5000, ScriptBasic loads, initializes and process the PRINT script in .006 seconds.

Code: [Select]

PRINT

jrs@laptop:~/sb/test$ time scriba prtpgm.sb


real   0m0.006s
user   0m0.004s
sys   0m0.000s
jrs@laptop:~/sb/test$

About the same time as it takes light to travel one mile in a vacuum.

[kryton9]

John, yes the numbers are interesting. It will be interesting to see how Windows 8 progresses and effects things in the next 2 years.

Here is something that surprises me, that is C ranking #1 for a very long time, except for a short while.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
You have to scroll down to the "Very Long Term History" section on the page. Basically #1 since 1987. That just amazes me.

Another language that surprises me is Perl. It has been around in the top languages forever and I think has the most libraries of any language out there.
I never learned it or played with it, but the syntax is not bad looking from the example code I have seen.

[Support]

When Peter Verhas was developing ScriptBasic, (late 90s) he was using C and Perl at the time. Python hadn't made it's mark yet but if you look closely at the SB code, it will be sprinkled with both Perl and Python concepts complementing the traditional BASIC syntax.

[Support]

Robbie Matthews that manages the Google Groups Android scripting list has a book out that might interest Android tablet developers.

Robbie Matthews gives a full, no-holds barred introduction to Android programming for tablets. No previous experience required!

more ...

[kryton9]

I think windows 8 is going to effect Android market share, at least if this post is true.
http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/opinion/2432/no-but-for-reals/

[Support]

I don't think people can afford to be loyal to the Microsoft morphing monster any longer. They are broken and Steve isn't the person to fix it.

Who would of thought PHP would have been as popular as it is?

[kryton9]

PHP once you use it for awhile is not bad. It just takes a few days to get used to it. I spend a few weeks setting up a webserver from my home to see how it all worked about 8 years ago and really got into it PHP hot and heavy then and was impressed that you could do so much with it and javascript. But I just didn't have a fast enough upload bandwidth to use it. So I moved over to web hosted servers.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out the next 2 years. I am sure Google is working behind the scenes to get over the non unified world of android out there. I do get a lot of errors on my android devices, but luckilly it just crashes the app and not the whole device.

[Support]

Release Notes: r5x21 4-Jun-2012

• FullScreenUI Updates
  
• android:textSize now supports 'sp','dp','mm','in','px' and 'pt' suffixes
• android:textColor now works, and supports #aarrggbb, #rrggbb, #argb and #rgb notations. Also supports standard html color names.
• android:textStyle now works.
• nextFocus functions should work. (Needs testing)
• Should add support for all layout properties in fullscreenui. (Needs feedback - only quickly tested)(r5x15)
• Added support for "digits" property in fucreenui
• Added typeface, textHintColor, textLinkColor and textHighlightColor (r5x14)
• margin and padding properties (r5x15)
• Added fullKeyOverride (support for  issue 622 ) (r5x18)
• fullShow now switches without flicker (r5x19)
• Added eden's additional bluetooth discovery functions. (r5x10)
• Fixed strange characters on full keyboards when trying to type brackets in intepreter shell. Also enabled ctrl keys on keyboards that support them. (r5x11)
• Editor will now remember cursor location between session. (r5x12)
• Applied patches from Agustin Henze, Issues 592, 605 and 609: Added some location functions, a bug displaying url in wrong thread, and standardizing notifications. (r5x13)
• Included support for "Sleep" language (from tomcatalbino)
• Included support for "Squirrel" language (from Andy Tai)
• Included patch to deal with public servers and ipv6: (r5x16)
• Fix to  issue 621 , events going missing on non-blocking eventWait (rx18)
• Fix to issue 631, wrong thread error when updating lists. (r5x20)
• Fix to NPE when setting typeface in initial layout( r5x21)

Updated API Ref

[Support]

Hi everyone,

I have had a go at making a version of SL4A that is for Android Honeycomb devices, especially the Asus EEE Pad Transformer. The APK for my version is attached and the source code and change history can be found at: http://code.google.com/r/liamgreenhughes-sl4a-tf101/. This version is designed to fit in with the whole Honeycomb user experience so you will notice that it looks a bit different. Some functions have been extended to add support for some of the features found on these devices such as the front camera, high-def video and the extra battery in the EEE Pad's keyboard. Some screenshots are below. The Triggers functionality doesn't quite work properly yet but the rest should be usable.

Comments and feedback very welcome!

Download & more ...

Honeycomb Screenshot

[kryton9]

Thanks John for the info. I get confused too easily anymore jumping from language to language and system to system. I still get into the mood every so many months, but the old mind is not as cooperative as it was 10 years ago

First time in my life, I hope Microsoft gets version 8 right to unify truly once and for all multi-device development. But they seem to do things to shoot themselves in the foot quite often. Already signs of it with no opengl support for arm devices, at least so far.

[Support]

I found this SL4A API Help Guide that might be worth having a peek at.

[Support]

Dr. AIR comes through again and finds the solution to bringing ScriptBasic extension modules to life on Android Linux. (NDK)

[kryton9]

Nice to see your team making progress John. Thanks for the updates.

[Support]

Here are a few more extension module calls to the t.so (tools) and ux.so (unix specific) functions.

t_xml.sb

Code: [Select]

declare command XML alias "xmlserialize" lib "/data/data/org.scriptbasic/t.so"

a{"Name"}="John"
a{"Age"}=59

print XML(a),"\n"

t_md5.sb

Code: [Select]

declare sub MD5 alias "md5fun" lib "/data/data/org.scriptbasic/t.so"

m = MD5("JRS")
print "0 |1 |2 |3 |4 |5 |6 |7 |8 |9 |A |B |C |D |E |F |\n"
for x = 1 to len(m)
  print right("0" & hex(asc(mid(m,x,1))),2) & "|"
next
printnl

ux_fork - I was surprised that Android allowed forking a child process.

Code: [Select]

declare sub uxfork alias "uxfork" lib "/data/data/org.scriptbasic/ux.so"

pid = uxfork()

IF pid THEN
  PRINT "Created a child process with a PID of ",pid,"\n"
ELSE
  PRINT "This is a child process with the PID of ",pid,"\n"
END IF

LINE INPUT x