BABBLE-ANDROID
NOTE: This is alpha software. Breaking changes are likely to be made as the interfaces are refined. Also there are a few areas which need some attention:
- Documentation - only parts of the API have been documented.
- Code quality - some parts of the code need tidying up.
- Test coverage - we need to work towards much higher test coverage.
babble-android allows developers to easily integrate the Babble consensus engine into their Android apps.
A partial API reference can be found here
Quickstart
The best place to start is the sample app. This is a demo app which shows how the components in the library can be used to build a simple chat app.
For the impatient, add the following to your app's build.gradle file:
implementation 'io.mosaicnetworks:babble:0.5.1'
and start coding!
For the very impatient we've added the sample app to the google play store. Install it to get a quick feel for what babble can be used for.
Library Components
At the core of the library is the BabbleNode class. This is a wrapper around our golang implementation of Babble. This class can be used directly or alternatively the BabbleService class can be used which essentially wraps the BabbleNode class inside an Android Service.
Where devices have a publicly accessible IP address they can be configured to use these addresses to communicate directly. However when this is not the case, in particular when devices are behind a NAT and do not have publicly accessible IP addresses, the nodes can be configured to use WebRTC In this case the BabbleNode instance is provided with the public keys of the peer nodes and the address of a signaling server.
Whether using WebRTC or public IP addresses, the devices which make up a network will need to be passed to the BabbleNode instance. Unless you intend to hard code this information into your app (which works fine for a fixed set of static groups), the app will need to discover groups and retrieve this information. We've included an MdnsDiscovery class to enable devices on the same local network to discover each other. MDNS is not suitable in use cases where WebRTC would be used, in this case we have a WebRTCService class which uses a discovery server to discover groups.
Once the discovery procedure has retrieved the peer information this needs to be written to configuration files on the device. A ConfigManager class has been included which takes care of writing the necessary configuration files.
We've also included some pre-baked UI components that essentially wrap up the two discovery mechanisms allowing you to focus on building your specific app logic.
Take a look at the sample app to see one way the various components can be used to build a real app.
Library Development
If you want to build the library you'll need the Android SDK. This can be installed as part of an Android Studio install, or alternatively you can download and install the command line tools only.
The library can then be built, either by calling the relevant gradle commands from the command line or from within Android Studio.