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Publication
Development of a framework to create plugins in Android Apps
| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1 MB | Adobe PDF |
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The present work aims to allow developers to implement small features on a certain Android
application in a fast and easy manner, as well as provide their users to install them ondemand,
i.e., they can install the ones they are interested in. These small packages of features
are called plugins, and the chosen development language to develop these in was JavaScript.
In order to achieve that, an Android framework was developed that enables the host
application to install, manage and run these plugins at runtime.
This framework was designed to have a very clean and almost readable API, which allowed
for better code organization and maintainability.
The implementation used the Google’s engine “V8” to interpret the JavaScript code and
through a set of JNI calls made that code call certain Android methods previously registered
in the runtime.
In order to test the framework, it was integrated with the client’s communication application
RCS+ using two plugins developed alongside the framework. Although these plugins had
only the more common requirements, they were proven to work successfully as intended.
Concluding, the framework although successful made it clear that this kind of development
through a non-native API has its set of difficulties especially regarding the implementation of
complex features.
Description
Keywords
Plugins JavaScript Android Framework API