3

Has anyone made use of ASE (Android scripting enviroment) for anything other than proof of concept apps?

What are the major limitations?

Any feedback would be great.

systempuntoout
  • 71,966
  • 47
  • 171
  • 241

3 Answers3

4

As this stage, using the ASE as your actual product's platform would in general be a bad move if performance is critical. It's great for rapidly prototyping something and/or verifying your understanding of how the API works. But the performance hit is nontrivial. This is the approach Google recommends, too:

With respect to the interpreters ASE provides, Lua and Python are both cross compiled C binaries that run in their own process. CPython is significantly more performant than Jython (especially since Android does not currently support JIT).

As for the Android facades, the API is primarily focused on making it easier to write scripts than on the performance of those scripts. That said, remember the adage "measure first, then optimize." ASE is about rapid development after all.

If you have performance concerns for your application, it's probably better to use the standard Android SDK (or NDK) where you'll have more control over the system.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
John Feminella
  • 303,634
  • 46
  • 339
  • 357
0

ASE, as the name implies, is a scripting environment.

You shouldn't use it to build full-fledged apps, it should only be used for small everyday-use scripts.

I.e. if you thought "I'll code for android using python", think again: as long as you can't compile it and have full library access, it's a no go.

o0'.
  • 11,739
  • 19
  • 60
  • 87
  • What do you mean with "small everyday-use scripts"? – systempuntoout May 16 '10 at 18:19
  • Any small script you would make on a normal computer using a scripting language. Something usually not meant for distribution, and definitely not for doing complex things. – o0'. May 16 '10 at 18:33
-2

Since the GUI support is near to zero, my feedbacks about ASE are near to zero too.

Htechno
  • 5,901
  • 4
  • 27
  • 37
  • can someone comment on why mkotechno is getting negative marks? If there isn't any GUI support, that affects my decision to even use it for testing and proof of concept demos. Or better yet, mkotechno, can you provide links as proof that ASE cannot support GUIs? – Dave Dec 07 '10 at 15:14