This week in Discobot (26.2011)

Currently, we (Erik Pragt and Marcin Erdmann) are working on getting Groovy to run on Android and make the process as smooth as possible for other developers. On this blog regular updates will be posted to inform you about the progress we made, the problems we ran into and how we solved them. This is the first episode of ‘This week in Discobot’.

As you’ve probably seen on twitter, Erik managed to finally run a really simple android application where the main activity class is a groovy class. We had some problems with resources files used by DefaultGroovyMethods and also with call site caching, but thanks to Jochen and his answers on the mailing list, Erik was able to get around them. Erik’s next goal is to run groovy’s test suite on android so that we can be sure what works and what doesn’t. It’s going to be also a good safety measure to know if everything still works after patching a newer version of Groovy.

I’m currently working on making it easy to build groovy applications for android. For obvious reasons I’ve decided to use gradle. There is a gradle android plugin which I’ve already evaluated and learned that I’ll have to to tweak it a bit. I plan to create a discobot plugin that will combine the tweaked android plugin and groovy plugin plus some build tasks. Thanks to that and a tutorial one should be able to build a simple application from scratch in less than 10 minutes.

See you next week!