start writing applications - how?

Andreas Jellinghaus aj at dungeon.inka.de
Thu Nov 15 19:37:13 CET 2007


Thomas Wood wrote:
> A simple hello world tutorial is available on the wiki:
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Building_a_hello_world_application

That one needs an openmoko build system, and to create one you need many
hours and gigabytes of free disk space. maybe not the preferred way for
a new comer?

I wrote up what I learned, and with ~15 minutes (flashing included) I had a
python hello world on my moko:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/User:AndreasJellinghaus/GetStarted

but of course writing in C has certain advantages, so the link Thomas
posted is valid and the investment in a local openmoko build system might
be worth your time.

> To be honest, it isn't that hard to write programs in C. C is a really
> simple language. The only tricky bit in this case is cross compiling.
> 
> If you really don't want to write applications in C, then I suspect
> Python will be the next best supported language.

I agree. but while I don't know what my application will look like at the
end, creating some prototype and example code is much faster done in
python. Later I can rewrite some or all parts in C.

> Common sense applies most of the time. Don't make your application wake
> up excessively (e.g. avoid polling anything). Only keep in memory what
> you need, unless you are likely to need it quickly. Basically, if you
> apply good general programming techniques and practises, you probably
> won't run into any problems.

still it would be good to have some examples of nice working application
designs for mobile phones. for example in the android video I saw they
require each gui app to save the state with some system daemon when it is
not on top and the system daemon can kill it whenever it wants.
I wonder if a similar design would be nice for moko? what is the current
strategy? hope not to run out of memory, and if we do the linux oom handler
does it job (we hope it kills the right app)?

> Well, a lot of people are excited about the project, but most of them
> don't have the time to contribute anything more useful than the
> occasional e-mail on the community mailing list. :-)

still that is very welcome. I now found out how easy it is to get started
with python and gtk, so I hope I can create some app too :)

Regards, Andreas




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