BrightstarDB for Android¶
The 1.6 release of BrightstarDB introduces EXPERIMENTAL support for running BrightstarDB as an embedded store on Android. The implementation is based on the Portable Class Library build of BrightstarDB with an Android-specific platform assembly.
Adding BrightstarDB to an Xamarin.Android Project¶
The easiest way to add BrightstarDB to an Android development project is via NuGet. This is exactly the same procedure as for any Portable Class Library platform as documented in Developing Portable Apps.
Building From Source¶
To build from source you will require an installation of Xamarin.Android at Indie level or above. Unfortunately once BrightstarDB is included the built application size will exceed the maximum supported by the Free version of Xamarin.Android.
The project file for Xamarin.Android support is kept in a separate solution from the main PCL code because of this additional external dependency. So to build the code for Android you will need to open the solution file src\portable\xamarin.sln.
Using BrightstarDB under Android¶
Please note the following when using BrightstarDB from within an Android application.
- Due to limited resources (both time and money!) the code has only been tested on the Google emulators. It has not been tested on any Android hardware.
- The REST client is not tested and not supported yet.
- Ensure that the StoresDirectory property of your embedded client connection string specifies a path that your application can write to. The persistence layer used will use the System.IO classes in Mono, not IsolatedStorage, so you need to be careful to provide a path that Android will allow your application to read from and write to (including creating subdirectories and files).
- The default configuration values for PageCacheSize and QueryCacheMemory are almost certainly too large for a mobile device. As there is no easy way to use app.config from any PCL application, we recommend that you explicitly set the BrightstarDB.Configuration class properties when your application starts up.
- Query is not currently optimized for devices with small amounts of memory. SPARQL queries can vary quite widely in their runtime memory footprint depending both on how the query is written and on the size of data being queried. We plan on addressing the amount of memory used by SPARQL query processing in a future release.
OK, that is a lot of caveats, but we would really welcome one or two brave souls trying this out in a test Android application and giving us some feedback.