Java News from Friday, June 26, 2009

Google has released the Android Native Development Kit 1.5:

As you know, Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain kinds of applications.

The NDK provides:

This release of the NDK supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set and provides stable headers for:

Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous! Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. That said, some applications that have self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory may still benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code. Some examples are signal processing, intensive physics simulations, and some kinds of data processing.

Honestly, this is 1.0; but I guess they wanted to sync the version number with the OS.