For our February meetup, we are going to take a step back from the Dalvik virtual machine (i.e. the Java SDK) and explore the often-overlooked (and somewhat poorly documented) Android Internals and NDK.

Specifically, Marko Gargenta (who happens to be my brother) plans to show us the anatomy of Android system, how various parts work as well as how to use JNI and NDK to write our own native libraries to be called from our Android applications. We will learn how Android system starts up, what major pieces run as part of the C library, how each application is isolated from others, what they use to communicate between them.

Here is a rough outline of Marko's talk:

Anatomy of Android
Linux kernel
Native Libraries
Android Runtime
Application Framework

Android Physiology
Startup Walkthrough
Layer Interaction

JNI Overview
JNI Overview
JNI Development - Java
JNI Development - C
Compiling JNI sample application

Using NDK
What is NDK
Installing and setting up NDK
Getting started with NDK
Creating a simple application using NDK

Pizzas for this event will be sponsored by Jenny Roy from Lookout, the makers for a Android security app (which utilizes the NDK). As before, we'll give out a couple of Android books from Pearson (and possibly some other swag).

About Marko Gargenta:
Marko founded Marakana back in 2001 to help underprivileged youth, minorities, and inner-city kids learn web technologies and get ahead in life. So Marakana emerged with goal of helping people get better at what they do professionally, focused on open source software training.

Marko is the developer of Marakana Android Training series. He has taught Android for companies such as Sony-Ericsson, Qualcomm, Ericsson Canada, and many others. Marko is a co-founder of San Francisco Android Users Group and regularly teaches Android Bootcamp at Marakana.

In 2006 Marko Gargenta published "PHP and MySQL By Example", a collection on PHP examples. The book was published by Prentice Hall, world's largest technology publisher and has been also translated to Spanish.

Marko Gargenta obtained his Bachelor of Mathematics Degree from University of Waterloo (Canada's MIT) and has been developing in Java since 1996. He lives in San Francisco, California.