Compiling the libcurl networking library

The libcurl library is a de facto standard for native applications, which deal with numerous networking protocols. The libcurl compilation for Android on a Windows host requires some additional steps to be done. We explain them in this recipe.

Getting ready

Download the libcurl source code from the library homepage: http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/.

How to do it...

1. Since the libcurl library build process is based on Autoconf, we will need to generate a curl_config.h file before actually building the library. Run the configure script from the folder containing the unpacked libcurl distribution package. Cross-compilation command-line flags should be set to:

   --host=arm-linux CC=arm-eabi-gcc

2. The -I parameter of the CPPFLAGS variable should point to the /system/core/include subfolder of your NDK folder, in our case:

   CPPFLAGS=”-I D:/NDK/system/core/include”

3. The libcurl library can be customized in many ways. We use this set of parameters (disable all protocols except...