Chapter  5

Introducing SL4A: The Scripting Layer for Android

The main objective of this chapter is to introduce you to the Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) platform. Our aim is to give you enough basic understanding of how SL4A1 works and to be able to use it to run your own scripts written in a number of high-level scripting languages.

As you will see, the design of SL4A enables it to support many scripting language interpreters. In order to make practical use of SL4A, you will need to understand at least the rudiments of one high-level scripting language such as Python, Ruby, Perl, Lua, JavaScript, or BeanShell.

For this book, we assume that you have a good level of Java programming language knowledge and this should serve you well if you ...

Get Practical Android Projects now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.