Re: [xmlvm-dev] Writing Native Methods To The New C Backend & Windows Phone 7

[Markus N. <mar...@gm...>]

Hi,

I am one of the guys working on the WP7 project. At the moment this project
is still handled in a separate branch and we are using the same demos as for
the iphone cross compilation (xokoban, afireworks, ...). We also have a few
very simple WP7 demos which don't use android but use the WP7 classes
directly (e.g. the WP7 equivalent to ifireworks for iPhone).

When the Android compatibility library was originally written everything was
hardcoded for exclusive use with iOS and we are at the moment refactoring
this whole library into two parts: platform specific parts for iOS and WP7
and a shared platform independent part.
I would say we are 2-3 month away from reaching a point where this
refactoring will be done and the demo applications xokoban and afireworks
will run with the WP7 backend.

At this point we want to merge back to the trunk. However even after those
two demos run the WP7 backend will be by far not as complete as the iPhone
side and many things will still be missing (multimedia stuff, some UI
widgets, etc.)

@Access to C# API: You should be able to use native methods on the WP7
backend as well and access underlying C# functionality in them.
Alternatively you can expose C# functionality as wrapper classes as we did
for e.g. Buttons, Checkboxes, ...

I hope this helps. Send me a follow up in case some things aren't clear.

Regards,
Markus

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 9:17 PM, <sha...@ya...> wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> first let me thank you guys for the amazing work you did on this project.
> Its really moving along at an amazing pace, well done!
>
> I've been looking into moving some of our code to the iPhone, we have quite
> allot of native iPhone code which I would like to merge with the Java
> porting layer we have in place. The plugin approach recommended in the past
> seems to be deprecated (the objc backend was always a no-go for us due to
> its limitations) but I'm somewhat stuck with implementing native interfaces,
> I'm trying to do this by example but allot of things are unclear to me...
>
> 1. Where do I put the native code? Do I just stick a native_package_class.c
> file and it would get picked by the build or should I do additional work?
>
> 2. I'm looking at the native methods and they have special comments within
> them, is this used by your parsing or just for debugging purposes? What's
> important to know about implementing these methods?
>
> 3. Is there a tool for generating native method stubs? So far the best I
> could find was removing the native keyword and running through XML VM.
>
> 4. I used the method XMLVMUtil_convertFromByteArray but I'm not 100% clear
> on what it does and where I should use it (besides for the purpose of
> extracting a string).
> How do I access Java objects such as arrays/Strings etc.?
> How do I invoke a Java method from the native code? I can just type in the
> bytecode like the converter does or for simplification I can just call the
> function but would that be "correct"?
>
> 5. Are there plans to support JNI? It would be really nice since I have
> quite a bit of JNI code which should be pretty portable.
>
>
> On a completely unrelated matter, what is the status of the Windows Phone 7
> code?
> I didn't see examples of that around here and I'd like to get a leg up on
> that port as well, here I will probably also need access to the underlying
> C# API if you have any tips.
>
>
> Thanks Again.
> Shai.
>
>
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