Re: Ada 'hello world' for Android; success!

[Brad Moore <brad.moore@shaw.ca>]

On 30/10/2011 4:56 AM, Stephen Leake wrote:
> The biggest problem I have with the current Android documentation is
> that it does not document threading behavior, even though it has
> multiple threads, and "callbacks" that must operate across threads.
> Which means it is impossible to avoid deadlocks and race conditions. As
> part of my Ada on Android development work, I'll be attempting to
> reverse engineer and document the threading behavior of the various
> features I use.

>               doing useful stuff with a solid multi-tasking GUI
> is not trivial, so you need complex structures to make it work. From
> what I have seen so far, the Android GUI framework is easier to use, yet
> just as powerful, as GtkAda.
>
> It will be interesting to see if Ada tasks are useful with Android.

Just to clarify, Ada tasks are definitely useful with Android, the
Paraffin release uses Ada tasks which interact with protected objects
to provide parallelism with dual core Android devices.
Ada tasks work well with Ada tasks. I believe what you are wondering
about is whether Ada tasks play nicely with Java threads,
(threads that perhaps get created via GUI API calls.)
I haven't tried that, though I suspect they can interact the same
that they do on Linux, through GNAT specific packages such as via the
GNAT.Threads package. I haven't experimented yet with Ada-Java threading.
It would be good to see an Ada GUI app such as your music player project 
available for Android.