Re: GSoC: Nmap on Android

[luke jeter <luke.jeter () gmail com>]

Android is designed to run all applications within a custom built Java VM
called Dalvik, which comes with a fairly comprehensive API that also makes
gui development quite simple. I did a search a couple of days ago concerning
the Android's ability to run Python, and I did find a couple of projects
currently being developed. If my understanding is correct from the brief
look I gave them, they're Python interpreters written with the Java-based
Android SDK. I think it would be a good idea to try using that
implementation first obvious reasons, however I can think of two potential
complications: 1 - Running a Python application within a DVM (Dalvik Virtual
Machine) might present too much of a burden on a phone's limited resources
 2 - shrinking a Zenmap window down to a typical 480 x 320 pixel screen
shows that some modification to the gui might be required to achieve maximum
effect. (I've also read that lower-end 240 x 320 resolution phones will
become more popular which would require substantial re-working imho, as well
as the fancy Nexus One's 480 x 800 size, which obviously poses little
problems as far as display goes.)

My thought is that if a second layout (or two or three) will be done to
improve how things are displayed on such a relatively small screen, why not
spend the same amount of time creating a new gui using the tools provided by
the Android SDK. There are probably other features that would be nice to
have on a handheld device that I don't think already exist in Zenmap, such
as a list of reachable wireless networks, which could also be written into
an Android-specific interface.

One last note - I'm still in the learning phase when it comes to both
Android and Zenmap, so my apologies if I made any mis-representations or
simply have my facts wrong.

luke

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:54 PM, David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 12:55:49PM +0500, Hasanat Kazmi wrote:
> > I am potential Google Summer of Code student 2010. I want to see
> > possibilities of porting Nmap to Android platform.
> >
> > I favor Android being first mobile platform for Nmap because:
> >
> > Porting is easy: Thanks to Android's NDK (Native Development Kit), it
> seems
> > possible that Nmap can be compiled using Android SDK. Zenmap or anyother
> > current GUI can not be ported directly, so I assume majority of work
> would
> > be on developing GUI
> >
> > Android has more usage: (specially as compared to Maemo) Android phones
> are
> > more in number and are growing, specially people who use Nmap are more
> > likely to have Android device than Maemo, iphone, j2me VMs etc
>
> I agree that if one mobile platform is a lot easier than the others, it
> makes sense to work on the easy one first. That will give us some
> experience and possibly make the code more portable in general in the
> process.
>
> I'm curious about why Zenmap can't be ported directly. Is it because
> Android is missing some dependency, like Python or GTK+? What is the
> standard way of developing graphical applications on Android?
>
> David Fifield
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