[fpc-pascal] PPCJVM Android JVM target and building to dex

[Sven Barth]

Mgr. Janusz Chmiel <janusz.chmiel at volny.cz> schrieb am Sa., 3. Aug. 2019,
11:48:

> Many of advanced users and developers have tried PPCJVM. It is really
> possible to create fully functioning Android applications. And because
> it is even possible to access methods from previously compiled .jar
> files including Mysql.jar and others, Pascal language have very big
> potential.
> But it has a very remarkable hook.
> Latest JDK for WIndows from Oracle do not support old versions of Apache
> ANT, so it is not possible to build .dex files from classes, which have
> been previously generated by using PPCJVM.
> So The future or Pascal compilation to .dex fomrat is severely
> disadvantaged. Because old JDK 7 X release can produce .dex files and
> only specific versions of Android build tools.
> So The reality is, that PPCJVM can produce reliable classes, but there
> is not too much projects, which can convert those .class files to dex
> format.
> Does somebody of you know about The solution to this issue?
> I Am afraid, that this situation can lead to The fact, that PPCJVM will
> not support ANDROID target JVM for too long times. If something positive
> will not happen to generate while using newest JRE and JDK.
>

Hmm? The important part of converting the .class files to classes.dex is
the dx utility which is part of the Android toolchain. Apache ANT is only a
build system like Make or Gradle (which seems to be /the/ hype for Android
development). My first PPCJVM Android app I even built without any build
scripts completely by hand (see here:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_JVM_Android_Development#Building_an_Android_application
). The process might be a bit more involved nowadays, but in principle it
will still be the same.

TL;DR: the compiler is not the problem. But maybe the build chain needs to
be adjusted.

Regards,
Sven

>
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