I downloaded and installed the latest Android scripting package, now called Scripting Layer for Android, or SL4A. I had some issues with it under CyanogenMod5 (probably my own, but I never debugged). Today I updated to a CM6 release and it seems to be working a whole lot better. There are links to a whole bunch of examples on the Tutorials page.

The application interface itself is pretty simple. When it first loads up you won’t have any interpreters besides shell. If you go into the View menu, select interpreters, and then select Add from the menu under there you can add other interpreters. The interpreters generally come with example scripts, which will show up in the main list view once they’re loaded:

There’s a preferences screen, which covers mostly visual options:

If you long press on a script you have an option to edit it:

The editor that comes up is just a simple but effective textbox, so at least you can edit scripts in place on the device:

And then you can run a script, in this place displaying a toast message over the keyboard when I run the hello world program: