Android distribution

[luben]

I have recently added Android support. Zstd-jni sources can be imported in Adroid Studio and used from Android apps. I am not familiar with the dependency management on Android and best practices for distributing libraries containing native shared objects. Any suggestions how improve over using zstd-jni as git sub-module will be highly appreciated.

[ItsShadowCone]

You should add these to the gitignore as they are produced at least by android studio. (not sure if the zstd-jni.iml is a generic one)

.externalNativeBuild/
zstd-jni.iml

[luben]

Good call! I missed them

[luben]

Any feedback from using it on Android is always welcome, even if you don't have suggestions how to improve it.

[yrom]

I think you can publish the android library outputs, which named AAR, to maven central.

Run gradle assembleRelease, you'll see it in path like build/outputs/aar/zstd-jni-release.aar'. Rename this file to zstd-jni-VERSION.aar and upload it as a part of artifacts.

Android users can add it as an android library dependency, after uploaded:

dependencies {
    implementation "com.github.luben:zstd-jni:$VERSION@aar"
}

Sorry for my bad english, hope this helps 😄

[luben]

I will try this. One question, is it going to handle multiple platforms with it? Like arm32 vs aarch64?

[ItsShadowCone]

If I understood it correctly it would (like any android app), compile it for every Abi and include them in the aar file. Unless you have some specific magic running to make it work on android of course

[yrom]

As you can see in this pic, android build tool would bundle all ABIs that android supported into aar. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis

[luben]

That's great, I will make a new release this week with it

[ghost]

hi

how can I compress string data between android java and node js?

[luben]

I just pushed 1.3.4-9 with an aar included. It should arrive soon at maven central. Can you test if it works as expected?

[luben]

Hmm, for some reason, didn't shows on MavenCentral. Pushed a no-change release 1.3.4-10, hopefully it will show up.

[re-thc]

Might be a good idea to publish to jcenter? That's what Android uses as default.

[luben]

Good idea, I will investigate

[luben]

I have added a section in the README explaining how to add MavenCentral to the gradle/android repositories. For now will continue publishing just to MavenCentral - the release process is quite complicated and I don't want to add more overhead.

[luben]

Thanks a lot for all the help and suggestions. I am closing the issue as I think we have stable Android distribution channel now.

If you find any issue with the Android support, please open a new issue.