Re: Lua for mobile development

[Michal Kottman <k0mpjut0r@...>]

On 21 June 2012 18:23, Jose <jmalv04@gmail.com> wrote:
>> and they have to be implemented in their own class, so there will
>> never be a pure-Lua way of developing rich Android applications.
>
> Why not a LuaJIT-based approach (that overrides the need to know/use Java,
> Objective-C or C#) ? Is that feasible or not ?

You definitely can create an application in C/C++, and therefore also
using Lua / LuaJIT. The problem is that in order to access the GUI,
you need to have a Java class implementing an Activity, which is also
specified in the AndroidManifest and is able to receive Intents (so
that it can be started from the launcher).

After more research, the closest thing I could find are the
NativeActivity [1] and a tutorial for it [2].

[1] http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/NativeActivity.html
[2] http://mobilepearls.com/labs/native-android-api/NATIVE-ACTIVITY.HTML

It allows you to implement functionality in C/C++ without the need to
implement any Java code, so in theory this could be used to create
single-activity Lua applications. Hmm, definitely something I will
look into later...