[maemo-developers] language and library advice, please.

[From: Martin Grimme]

Hi,

2008/11/11, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com>:
> It has been suggested that python would be an appropriate language,
> because it's available both on the n800 and Debian, and is probably
> fairly compatible between them.

I fully agree. It's very compatible between n800 and Debian.

> (a) What library(ies) should I be using for user-interfacing.  Are they
> reasonably compatible between Debian and maemo?

Take GTK. It's the native toolkit library of maemo and the GNOME
desktop (or XFCE) on Debian.

> (b) Are there a ready-made text-editing widget I can start with?  The
> complete structured text will contain a lot of reasonably small sub-texts
> that can be edited conventionally, at least in the prototype.  So I'd
> like to prototyoe it with a ready-made editor handling the smaller pieces
> of text (currently the pargest such piece is about 25K) ans saving the
> structural part for the regular UI library.

GtkTextArea might the widget you're looking for.

> (c) Any problems you can already see coming, based on experience with
> these tools?  (Here I'm not looking for generic software-engineering
> advice, but I'd like to know if there are any specific gotchas involving
> python or the recommended libraries.  I've been programming for decades,
> but not in python).

Toplevel window handling is a bit different between Debian and maemo.
But code can be written to use the appropriate way on each system. So
your code will run on both systems unaltered.


Regards,
Martin