[maemo-developers] Write once, run on WinXP, Ubuntu, Maemo; which graphical toolkit?

[From: Sascha Peilicke]

Here comes the mandatory question if Qt/C++ would be an option for you. Off 
course this can become a religious question easily. The drawback is that C is 
not an option there. In contrast to your proposed options, deployment should 
be a breeze, one (single) code-base, almost no porting necessary (apart from 
recompilation for your target platform). Java tends to be difficult to deploy 
right and is certainly not the fastest option on a mobile internet device. If 
it has to be C, I would stick with Gtk/Hildon, being it the native way to 
write Maemo apps. The Linux/Windows port will be a different beast though, the 
APIs for Hildon and stock Gtk differ quite a bit (altough lots of stuff is 
shared nowadays).

> 3. The application and its data files must reside on a USB thumb drive.
> The app must not write to or read from the host computer's hard disks,
> nor may it rely on any software on the local drives (other than the
> standard IO libraries and device drivers that come with the stock
> WinXP/Ubuntu/Maemo distro).
If it has to be bloody simple to install you app you can statically link Qt 
into your binary to have one (big) executable for every system, which can be 
exectued from your USB-stick our just drag'n'dropped somewhere else..

> 4. The user interface must appear consistent in its representation both
> the functional needs of the app and the look'n'feel of the each platform.
This should answer the question: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/gallery.html
Not shown there is the Maemo integration

> 5. In an ideal world, the development platform would enable me to write
> the software on my "powerful" HP laptop, then field-test it on the Eee
> and the N810.
Most easily done, there are official integrations for Eclipse, Visual Studio and 
there's the (still beta) QtDeveloper IDE. Off course there are others 
(KDevelop, ...) all platform-independent. 

Some documentation to validate Qt:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/how-to-learn-qt.html
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/index.html

Ahh and here is the SQL module documentation:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/qtsql.html
-- 
Sascha Peilicke
http://saschpe.wordpress.com
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