SL4A: Scripting Layer for Android

In the early days of commercial maturation of the Android OS, Googler Damon Kohler designed the SL4A to help promote the Android OS. SL4A helped differentiate Android from competitors like iOS because the early iPhone didn’t allow such scripting languages to coexist on the platform. When it was first introduced, it was called the Android Scripting Environment (ASE). SL4A intended to become the host container for a variety of scripting languages. SL4A can currently host seven languages:

  • BeanShell 2.0b4

  • Erlang

  • JRuby

  • Lua 5.1.4

  • PHP 5.3.3

  • Perl 5.10.1

  • Python 2.6.2

  • Rhino 1.7R2

Unlike most of the applications and utilities featured in this book, SL4A oddly cannot be directly installed from the Google ...

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