So, it is over, after 3 months working on QGIS for android as a Google Summer of code project it is now time to wrap up what I did and didn’t do.

First of all a QGIS android app exists now and it has many features including:
- reading/writing projects
- raster support
- spatialite support
- wms support
- (apparent – untested) wfs and postgress support
- partial shape files support (string attributes still chrash the app)
- Fully functional gui (SymbologyV2 doesnt work yet)
- (all?) core C++ plugins beside globe (any takers?

Further more I created a series of build scripts that make it easier to set up a dev environement.

Unfortunately I didnt manage to implement live GPS tracking and a larger gui optimisation, but all in all I’m very happy with the results and seeing that few peoples are already testing it. Soon ill publish a video.

cheers
Marco

See my last posts. In short I managed to get qgis packaged as an apk and to properly run with only one major problem. The map canvas is always black. I ll investigate this till Tuesday.
Cheers

After finishing with the gui(see previous post) i started testing the data providers.reading and writing shp files always ends in an app crash. Loading rasters, wms and gpx seems to work but the mapcanvas is never drawn. I have to investigate why. But probably it has to do with the draw used in qgis. The properties are there and get updated, but the canvasstays black. The same happens with decorations plugins like north arrow and copyright.
Next things i want to check is the shape error and the canvas problem. Then probably sqlite and gps.
Ciao Marco

This week Imanaged to get libqgisapp.so to build automatically if cmake is passed -DANDROID. as well I managed to implement all the JNI stuff that comes from necessitas. Apk file gets installed and the app tries to start but it silently fails after startQtApp is called succesfully. Logcat shows no message or anything. This week I’ll investigate this problem and hopefully get it all to run, this part was definitively tougher than planed.

This week I finally managed to get a test Qt application packaged as an apk file. The application uses the native Proj lib to do some projections conversions. Basically it does the same as what qgis will do just with much more dependencies.
The key problem was that necessitas wipes the libs directory when it generates a project and the native libs never get pushed to the device (bug report). As well, when they get pushed, for example by using the ant Task, then there was a versioning problem. Android does not support (and won’t in the future either) versioned libs, so I had to find a way around it. I came up with two solutions, the first is a custom java method in the QtActivity class that creates symlinks or copies the libraries on runtime and loads them accordingly. the other involves editing the SONAME of each lib and padding the versioning with 0 using the rpl program (rpl -R -e libexpat.so.1 “libexpat.so\x00\x00″ $INSTALL_DIR/lib). I dont know yet which approach to keep, but they both work properly.
I updated all the scripts to be cleaner and I’m working now on creating the libqgisapp.so once I have this all the app should be hopefully ready.
As well, I tried the full over th air deployement of the test app on a real device and it all works, just click on the link to the APK arm-V5 APK arm-v7a and all dependencies (Qt libs as well) get installed… pretty amazing

This week I managed to cross compile qgis and started working on packaging it. See the previous post for more details.

This week I fought against libiconv and spatialite that did not want to properly crosscompile. Due to time pressure I decided to temporarly work on it and moved on compiling qgis. I get to the linking part of the process where I get many errors. I m now looking into them. Furthermore I refactored the scripts to be more solid and I did a major wiki update (added errors, added how to, cleanup,…). I m now a week late on my schedule and I Hope to finally get qgis to compile soon.
Ciao Marco

This week I started cross compiling qgis and encountered some problems that I could’t solve yet but I’m working on it.
UPDATE: I just managed to have QGIS to properly configure, by using -DQT_QTUITOOLS_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/qt4/QtUiTools since it appears that necessitas has no QtUiTools yet. I’ll look into it.
UPPDATE2:or maybe not… got more errors now
As well I met with my mentor and we discussed the next steps needted after qgis compiles. We decided which toolbars where needed and that we would start by preconfiguring the install using the new configuration tool. As weel we had a look at which dialogs are not adapted for te screen of a tablet. Finally we had a look at how the GPS can be integrated and identified the useful classes. Here the results.
Needed toolbars
*Navigation
*Layer load
*basic digitizing (add, move nodes)
*infotool
*attribute table
*measurements
*layer legend

GUI Adaptations
*Layer properties add scrollbars

GPS
core/gps
app/gps
qgsGpsConnection sub class with parseData() (like nmeaConnection)
QIODevice subclass listening to android gps api and emitting readyRead()
extend QgsGpsDetector$

Next week I’ll focus on getting qgis to cross compile.
As soon as I’ll be done, I’ll start adding the vertical scrollbars to the gui dialogs that don’t have them (only the layer properties dialog) and then to support the GPS. Finally I’ll configure the toolbars.

This week I re-factored the install script to make it cleverer, compiled expat library, fixed the last problem that was blocking GDAL from installing and compiled QWT library using necessitas. As well I started and started looking on compiling qgis and how to add external libs to a necessitas package.

This week I’ll be mainly looking into how to compile QGIS to have it running on Android.

This week i finally got PROJ, GEOS and GDAL to compile and install. I updated all the instller scripts to use the NDK stand alone toolchain, using Android.mk files turned out to be more a hassle than useful. Furthermore using the standalone NDK toolchain the compire process can be totally scripted and thus integrated in bigger build systems. I started working on QWT as well and I plan to finish it next week. next week I plan as well to look into sqlite support in android (should already be there so no problem) and to look at flex and bison which are needed during the compilation of qgis.
Next week I’ll meet as well with Marco to discuss further developements.

This week, I worked on trying to get Android.mk files working, it looks like using the Android Toolchain standalone (I found in the docs how to use it cleanly) was more fruity, I started working on cross compiling GDAL and it looks not too bad. Using makefiles got me to more compile mistakes than anything else. Next week I’ll discuss with Marco what we should do (use android.mk or not).
The plan for next week is to finish off working with GDAL and start looking at QWT.
This week I also tried the new NDK to see if it made any difference but id does not look like.
The new scripts are in github
Cheers Marco

This week I managed to crosscompile PROJ 4.7.0 and created installer scripts for it and for GEOS, which gets to the linking step. but then stops due to the absence of STL in android. diggig into the problem I discovered (I’m almost ashamed) that the NDK docs explains how to deal with that problem (big RTFD to myself). So now I’m carefully reading the NDK docs and started experimenting with ndk_build script.
Next week I want to create ndk make files for this two libs and start on working on the next ones. I’m finally starting to understand the whole picture.

all, this week i leaped more int the cross compile realm. Geos almost done and started with proj4. I updated my necessitas infrastructure to necessitas v 0.2 and we decide to target android 3.0 which is optimized for tablets. I havent updated the wiki yet since i’ve been (and still am) mainly offline at the moment. On the dev list of Qgis tere have been interesting discussions about the needs of qgis mobile. Pity they started only now. Next week I ll continue crosscompiling and resume the list discussion on the wiki. Ciao Marco (sent from Marco

so the first (almost) week Is over. In this week I couldn’t do much since yesterday I finally graduated. Any how I managed to squeeze into the week some work (together with stuff I had done the previous week).
I finished setting up everything and I got a first Qt test application running on android. furthermore I started looking into which libraries need to be ported.
I created a Wiki page [0] and a github repository [1] for the project.
We also started porting the Proj and Geos libraries, further comments on the wiki.