Ok first off please forgive a numpty for what may be obvious questions.

Im a mostly perl programmer, and have ordered the N900, and am thinking of trying some app development.

From what ive read here , it seems Qt is the way to go, but im much more familiar with Perl than C++, while there does seem to be some Qt stuff for perl out there, but im guessing(as i cant find refernce to it) that qt support for perl is not available for the N900, is that right?

Or am i able to develop in perl and use (learn) Qt

I have tried googling, but am struggling to find where to start, so if any one has usefull advice for where to start, it would be most appreciated.

If i need to go down the c++ that probably ok long term, but id certainly be more comfortable trying to learn Qt with a language im more familiar with

using my pre-relase version, Perl is on the device and reports as version 5.8.3. I don't know if there is QT bindings that have been ported.

Also on the device is Python, and there are two projects to have QT pythong bindings (as i learnt at the recent Maemo summit). PyQT (older, but not offical), PySide (newer and nokia supported).

If you want to see a powerful Python App on Maemo you can look at MaStory (formerly Maemo WordPy).

I don't know about any serious perl binding for Qt (regardless of N900 or the desktop), the few that were/are available were mostly hobby projects that became abandonware when the original authors lost interest.

Alternatively, you can try Python, it's much less of a jump from Perl than C++ is.

Ahhh thanks, that kind of fits with what i saw, i think i tried to install a really old Qt binding last nigth and it was a complete flop.

I did find what looked to be a more up to date one , but even then i had my doubts, (http://perlqt.wikidot.com/installingperlqt) and i suspect your right its probably a hobby project.

But the main thing is if qt for perl is available for the N900 its probably not worth the effort looking for a desk top version, as the whole point was to have fun with my new N900

I have some C++ experience but very very rusty, so now i just need to think if i want to learn python or try refresh my c++ (i never enjoyed coding c++ as much as i enjoy perl)

I'm only aware of libqt-perl:

Description: Perl bindings for the Qt library
This module lets you use the Qt library from Perl.
It provides an object-oriented interface and is easy to use.
Homepage: http://perlqt.sourceforge.net/

(From apt-cache show libtq-perl, on my desktop)

It seems to have no updates since 2003 and would thus be horribly outdated, unfortunately.

Hi,

QT is a very complete C++ Library, I think it does not make much sense to use it with another language than C++. It does not only provide Gui-Classes. There are datastructures http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/containers.html
Networking http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/qtnetwork.html and a lot of other stuff reducing the c++-code you've to write.

Every QT call is feeded with QT Objects. So if you use it with another language there is a lot conversion work by the binding code. And if using from perl you've the interpreter running which eats your battery before lunch


wire-less

ahh i guess that means i need to go the c++ route as it seems silly to eat battery life. Cheers. I'll play around on my lap top with C++ and Qt and see if i feel like taking it further.

Most appreciated Craig

IMHO, the C++ way is the easiest path. C++ is very easy with the Qt API, and all the nice features that Qt adds. Sure, there are bindings, but there are a lot more Qt apps written in C++ than in all the bindings together. That means there will be also more developers that can help.

I call FUD... All the objects, data structures and libraries (XML, network etc.) in Qt are available from PyQt, which does not eat your battery for lunch, and further cuts down the amount of code you write by another order of magnitude :-)

Hi,

I'm a fellow perl programmer and am happy to report that for an embedded device, the N900 has a pretty complete perl.

There are some caveats however, please see this page I have created regarding perl on the device to see what they are: http://wiki.maemo.org/Perl

Since Maemo is debian, we should be able to import a lot of debian packages that are already built, I have started that process and will post more perl packages from debian and CPAN on gitorious.

Lastly, there are perl bindings for Qt4, but they are in the process of being written, here's the Google code repo: http://code.google.com/p/perlqt4/

And some more information here:
http://wiki.debian.org/JonathanYu/De...diting_Library

Please drop me a line if you have any questions or want to help completing the perl dev environment on the device - I think more perl programmers are needed and once they arrive we'll see some cool stuff. But of course, I'm biased. =]