Demonstration Serpentine Programs

This directory contains demonstration applications written in the Serpentine language that need to be run on a device with the Dalvik or ART virtual machines. They are also used as regression tests for any API or compiler breakage since changes to either of these may cause compilation to fail completely.

To compile the demos, invoke the buildall.py script, making sure that the Compiler package directory is in the PYTHONPATH. For example, from the root of the distribution type the following, remembering to substitute your own key and certificate files for the placeholders used:

PYTHONPATH=. Demos/Serpentine/buildall.py <key.pem> <cert.pem> /tmp/packages

Demos can also be built individually. For example:

PYTHONPATH=. Demos/Serpentine/JEFViewer/build.py <key.pem> <cert.pem> \
             /tmp/JEFViewer.apk

These demos are more extensive tests of functionality than those in the Examples directory and rely on more of the Java and Android APIs.

Demonstrations

• Fluid is a graphical demonstration that could form the basis for a simple game.
• HTTP Server implements an extremely simple Web server.
• JEF Viewer displays thumbnails of embroidery patterns stored in Janome JEF format files.

Documentation

Some of the demos are documented using inline docstrings. These are processed when the examples are built if the DOCS_DIR environment variable is set to the name of a directory. If an absolute path is not used, the name is interpreted as a subdirectory of the relevant example directory, as in the following example:

DOCS_DIR=docs PYTHONPATH=. Demos/Serpentine/JEFViewer/build.py \
                           <key.pem> <cert.pem> /tmp/JEFViewer.apk

This requires the demo's build script to have been written so that it reads the DOCS_DIR environment variable and passes it to the buildhelper.main function. The script uses the gendocs module to create an HTML file in the documentation directory.