Tim Bray is Google’s developer advocate for Android. In a blog post yesterday, Bray walks you through how to leverage the 10 gigabytes of Android open source code to start building Android applications.
Bray starts the post with some basic greping procedures using a tool he calls “jgrep.”
“Suppose, for example, that I wanted to figure out the use of CallLog.Calls, which exists to help you work with entries from the phone log,” Bray explains. “I have a little shell script around called ‘jgrep’, so I hop over to the top of the source-code directory and say: jgrep CallLog.Calls.”
It turns out Google provides its own version of jgrep with Android called, you guessed it, jgrep. It’s just a shell script that calls ‘find’ to search for .java files.
“After you’ve found Android code that does something along the lines that you were planning to do, the next step is to… steal it!. That’s what it’s there for,” , Bray said. “Well, since the license invoked at the top of every source file makes it clear that you can copy and re-use the source, it isn’t stealing. But it is what makes open source great.”
