Google has been providing more ways to create Android Apps for the Android Market Place, it has released an NDK (Native Development Kit) for Android 1.5.
So far the Android applications has been running in the Dalvik VM (Virtual Machine), but some developers may find this very limited. By using this new NDK, content creators will have a few more and better options to create mobile Apps.
What is Android NDK?
The Android NDK provides tools that allow Android application developers to embed components that make use of native code in their Android applications.
Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of their applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain classes of applications, in the form of reuse of existing code and in some cases increased speed.
The NDK provides:
A set of tools and build files used to generate native code libraries from C and C++ sources
A way to embed the corresponding native libraries into application package files (.apks) that can be deployed on Android devices
A set of native system headers and libraries that will be supported in all future versions of the Android platform, starting from Android 1.5
Documentation, samples, and tutorials
This release of the NDK supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set and provides stable headers for libc (the C library), libm (the Math library), the JNI interface, and other libraries.
The NDK will not benefit most applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks; notably, using native code does not result in an automatic performance increase, but does always increase application complexity. Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don’t allocate much memory, such as signal processing, physics simulation, and so on. Simply re-coding a method to run in C usually does not result in a large performance increase. The NDK can, however, can be an effective way to reuse a large corpus of existing C/C++ code.
Please note that the NDK does not enable you to develop native-only applications. Android’s primary runtime remains the Dalvik virtual machine.
Contents of the NDK
Development tools
The NDK includes a set of cross-toolchains (compilers, linkers, etc..) that can generate native ARM binaries on Linux, OS X, and Windows (with Cygwin) platforms.
It provides a set of system headers for stable native APIs that are guaranteed to be supported in all later releases of the platform:
libc (C library) headers
libm (math library) headers
JNI interface headers
libz (Zlib compression) headers
liblog (Android logging) header
A Minimal set of headers for C++ support
The NDK also provides a build system that lets you work efficiently with your sources, without having to handle the toolchain/platform/CPU/ABI details. You create very short build files to describe which sources to compile and which Android application will use them — the build system compiles the sources and places the shared libraries directly in your application project.
More Details can be found Here
You can also Join Android NDK Help Forum Here
For Windows Click Here (22500667 bytes)
For MAC OS X (Intel) Click Here (17215303 bytes)
For Linux x86 (32/64 bit) Click Here (16025885 bytes)