NOAD - NodeJS on Android Demo

Demo the ability of running a NodeJS application within Android.

Development

• Android Studio Flamingo
• NodeJS v18, npm
• Git LFS

Checkout / Clone

• git lfs clone REPO

Prepare NodeJS App

Just run the following:

./gradlew packageJs

Details:

• JS app resides in app/demo-js
• The JS app needs to be packaged into assets/v1/demo-js.zip
• gradle task packageJs is configured to do so (and does an npm install first)

Demo

There's an HTML presentation about "NodeJS on Android" served by fastify running on NodeJS on port 3000 (see app/demo-js/index.js).

1. Run the app on Android
2. In the lifecycle navigation, open the menu on the right and ...
   1. Click on prepare to install the NodeJS App to the right place
   2. Click on start to start the NodeJS App (in Android)
3. The webview pane (bottom nav) opens localhost:3000 and shows eventually the presentation (if the process got started)

The port is open to the world, means one can show the presentation in a browser of another device within the same network.

App

The app itselfs doesn't do a lot. It supports proper ProcessControl (see presentation), but no lifecycle management!

NOAD Main	NOAD Webview

Crafting the NodeJS binary

• use termux to build your own NodeJS executable. Ask https://github.com/neophob for help if needed.

Limitations

• the prepare and cleanup steps are currently blocking the main thread (which is a very bad thing). Use background jobs for such things...
• there's NO lifecycle control (see presentation) implemented.
• ATTENTION: don't use TCP/IP sockets for serving under Android in real world (except you know what you're doing). Use UNIX domain sockets instead.