An Overview of the App Inventor Sources

Apr 3, 2023 evan's Blog

This post is the first in a series of articles on the layout and structuring of the App Inventor sources, which are available on GitHub under the Apache Software License 2.0. Each week an article will cover a different part of the system.

The App Inventor sources are broken down into dfferent modules primarily at the directory level. When you clone the sources to your machine, there will be a root folder called appinventor under which you can find many of the primary modules:

• AICompanionApp - The sources for the iOS Companion
• AIComponentKit - The sources for the components that run on the iOS device
• aiplayapp - The sources for the Android Companion
• appengine - The sources for the app editor that run on Google App Engine
• blocklyeditor - MIT’s modifications to Google’s Blockly to support our blocks editor
• buildserver - The sources for the build server
• components - The sources for the components that run on the Android device
• docs - The documentation for all of the blocks and components
• SchemeKit - The sources for the Scheme interpreter used on iOS

The dependencies between these modules are:

This series will include articles on the following topics:

• 2023-04-10 - The Components module
• 2023-04-17 - The Runtime module
• 2023-04-24 - The SchemeKit module
• 2023-05-01 - The Companion
• 2023-05-08 - The Buildserver module
• 2023-05-15 - The Blockly Editor module
• 2023-05-22 - The App Engine module

Anyone interested in App Inventor development should be able to gain a deeper understanding of the system through these articles. We may update them from time to time as the system changes.