Building on the work documented by Adam Bell and assisted by some nudging and hints from Peter Hansen in #playbook-dev on freenode , I was able to successfully compile and build a basic SSH client for BlackBerry PlayBook. This was a native ARM binary; this was done by porting libssh over to QNX , and writing a simple front end for it.
Of course, this can only be executed from an ssh session used to connect to the PlayBook — we’re a ways away from an app that you can launch from an icon — but it’s a major first step. The other thing you might notice here is that I brought my own “libcrypt.so” files.
As it turns out, “libcrypt.so.1″ is not present on the PlayBook device – and this is the library that is required when building with -lcrypto in the Momentics IDE for QNX.
I cheated a bit by grabbing those ARM binaries from the QNX sdk and including them in my package; then used LD_LIBRARY_PATH to tell the PlayBook to find them in the current directory. I am hoping/assuming that this confusion will be resolved when the actual PB NDK is released. It’s worth mentioning that the other libraries I linked to (-lz, -lsocket, and -lpcap) seem to be working fine.
Meanwhile, up next is a native AIR plugin proof of concept. This won’t initially be an SSH interface, but just a simple plugin that I can use to demonstrate that it’s possible to write a native extension using the tools currently available.
Wish me luck – as it may not be possible. (A couple of key libraries may be missing from the freely available AIR SDK. )