Scripting in Android

Damon Kohler released last month the Android Scripting Environment (ASE), which enables running Python scripts in Android. Access to location and sensors, activities and intents, phone calls and text messaging, are just a few examples of the APIs available to scripts.

A more detailed article on this topic can be found on the Motorola developer blog.

How does Google manage Android's code

In a recent article, I read that Google currently uses Perforce as its source code management tool for Android. The reason why they chose this particular tool can be found in a comparison of other SCM systems (also Wikipedia offers more information if needed). In addition, it is worth mentioning that Android consists of around 8 million lines of Linux code, and about 11 million lines of Java/C++ and maybe some Python code. Since they want to open source around 8.6 million lines of code, Google will move away from Perforce when it comes to managing Android code, and use Git instead, an "open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency".

As a side note, one particular difference between Git and other SCMs is how Git handles data corruption. Most of SCMs have no checksums, and if they have, it's not really strong (CRC usually). Git goes further, and, beside using CRC and Adler32, it also utilizes cryptographic hashes. If you are interested in a book on Git, you have to wait a bit more.

Google App Engine

With Google App Engine, you can upload your web application and not be stressed with maintaining the servers, everything running on Google's infrastructure. Some of the main features as written in the docs:

• dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
• persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
• automatic scaling and load balancing
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
• a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer

You can download the Google App Engine SDK which includes a web server application that emulates all of the services of the App Engine on your own computer. In addition, there is a YouTube video on a demo describing how to develop and deploy an application on Google App Engine.

At this moment, Google App Engine is in preview release, so space is limited.

**UPDATE**
Google App Engine only supports at this moment web applications written in Python. Other languages will be supported in the future.