Under the hood, Monkey is a translator. That means it will translate your program, which is written in the Monkey programming language, into source code for the supported target languages. And because of this, your program will be able to run on various platforms, such as iOS, Android, XNA, OSX, and Windows.

After Monkey has translated your program into source code for a certain target platform, it will then utilize native tools and SDKs (Software Development Kits) on these platforms to finish the compilation and linking process. For this, you will need to install various tools and SDKs. For example, you need to install Xcode and the iOS SDK to create iPhone apps. Or, to create a Flash app, you need to install the Flex Actionscript compiler.

The following illustration shows the process of creating an application with Monkey:

Don't worry about installing any of these SDKs and other tools for now. We will go through this together. Your default installation of Monkey can always export to HTML5 . To play HTML5 games, the only tool you need to have installed is a current version of an HTML5-compatible browser, such as FireFox, Safari, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.