Application Portability?

[greg.kujawa]

I have a CRM application that I've written in Ruby that currently runs
on Win32 clients as well as Linux ARM clients (Sharp Zaurus PDA's). The
application uses Qt for its GUI presentation and XMLRPC calls to
push/pull contact data back and forth. It suits my purposes, but I am
looking to port it to other platforms, such as Windows Mobile and Palm
OS PDA's.

Getting Ruby compiled for the Palm OS is out of the question, and
getting Ruby to compile for Windows Mobile has hit many roadblocks. I
have tried looking at some Smalltalk implementations to accomplish
this, as I am willing to recode my app in another OO language if I can
definitely port it over to Windows Mobile and Palm OS. But even the
Smalltalk scenario would force me to recode the Smalltalk source itself
since one implementation wouldn't port between both platforms.

How about Python? Could I code the application once in Python and then
port it to both PDA platforms easily? Or is this a pipe dream? I don't
know much about Python yet, but would start picking it up if it could
fit the bill...

 

[UrsusMaximus]

You might look at http://www.awaretek.com/pymo.html which shows links
to Python versions for both PALM and Win CE as well as Sharp Zaurus and
other mobile platforms; however, the only mobile platform I have
personally used python on is the Zaurus, which works very smoothly, not
problems at all.

Good luck.

 

[Fuzzyman]

I *think* that Python for the Palm platform is stalled a bit (Pippy).

PythonCE is alive and well. Tkinter works quite well as a GUI front end
- but you have to work quite hard to build a usable GUI on a PocketPC
screen.

For a list of resources see http://www.traybor.com/PythonCE/

Luke Dunstan has *just* ported CTypes to the Windows Mobile platform
(and I think there is already a win32gui module anyway). This means it
ought to be possible to create a GUI using the native win32 widgets.

The latest version of Python on the windows CE platform is 2.3.4 -
although there are rumblings of a 2.4.2 port.

All the best,

Fuzzyman
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml

 

[Dody Suria Wijaya]

from your story, it seems that your apps has client and application
server separated by XMLRPC, which requires network connection all the
time. Then based on this assumption, IMHO, the simplest way to port to
PDA would be via web browser, which available natively on every PDA, and
thus very easy to deploy.

Otherwise, currently to run client application on windows mobile/CE for
real-world commercial deployment, I couldn't find the best way other
than to build it via whatever language/SDK that's native in that
platform. Which almost always in C/C++.

For python on PDA, I have only the chance to try on Linux Familiar on
Windows PPC 2003. Which require flashing the OS inside and have to cope
with long start-up time. It also lacks the libraries available on normal
platform (for me, wxPython) forcing me to use GTK, and the performance
wasn't really snappy which is understandable since the cpu is also
slower. But for simple apps, might be fast enough.

 

[Neil Benn]

I have a CRM application that I've written in Ruby that currently runs
on Win32 clients as well as Linux ARM clients (Sharp Zaurus PDA's). The
application uses Qt for its GUI presentation and XMLRPC calls to
push/pull contact data back and forth. It suits my purposes, but I am
looking to port it to other platforms, such as Windows Mobile and Palm
OS PDA's.

Getting Ruby compiled for the Palm OS is out of the question, and
getting Ruby to compile for Windows Mobile has hit many roadblocks. I
have tried looking at some Smalltalk implementations to accomplish
this, as I am willing to recode my app in another OO language if I can
definitely port it over to Windows Mobile and Palm OS. But even the
Smalltalk scenario would force me to recode the Smalltalk source itself
since one implementation wouldn't port between both platforms.

How about Python? Could I code the application once in Python and then
port it to both PDA platforms easily? Or is this a pipe dream? I don't
know much about Python yet, but would start picking it up if it could
fit the bill...

Hello,

I know that this isn't a fashionable thing to write on a
dynamic language newsgroup but I would really recommend switching to
Java for your work if you are looking at recoding it. I'm running Java
on handhelds and it works well. If you want to use dynamic languages
then you can use Jytjon, there is an unofficial port of Jython for
Personal Profile - I'm not sure how robust it is but you could take a
look at that.

Cheers,

Neil

--

Neil Benn
Senior Automation Engineer
Cenix BioScience
BioInnovations Zentrum
Tatzberg 46
D-01307
Dresden
Germany

Tel : +49 (0)351 4173 154
e-mail : (e-mail address removed)
Cenix Website : http://www.cenix-bioscience.com

 

[greg.kujawa]

Hello,

I know that this isn't a fashionable thing to write on a
dynamic language newsgroup but I would really recommend switching to
Java for your work if you are looking at recoding it. I'm running Java
on handhelds and it works well. If you want to use dynamic languages
then you can use Jytjon, there is an unofficial port of Jython for
Personal Profile - I'm not sure how robust it is but you could take a
look at that.


Cheers,


Neil

I was thinking this to myself as well, as Java should be available for
most of these platforms. It's just that I don't really want to use Java
unless I'm absolutely forced to Can't help it coming from scripting
languages like Perl and Ruby, plus toying around in Smalltalk. I'm sure
that Python would be useful to pick up too, if I have the time and
effort. It seems as if the libraries available for Python are
considerable compared to other languages. Everyone's responses are
appreciated for sure in this thread.

The web browser idea is a good one too, as my GUI isn't that
sophisticated, and I could get away implementing it as a basic
one-page-at-a-time web app. Just have to research how to pull off all
of the XMLRPC calls from within the web page coding. Should be
interesting how I can pull all of this off!

 

[Peter Hansen]

I was thinking this to myself as well, as Java should be available for
most of these platforms. It's just that I don't really want to use Java
unless I'm absolutely forced to Can't help it coming from scripting
languages like Perl and Ruby, plus toying around in Smalltalk.

Another option I've suggested in the past is to use Lua instead. It's
certainly much closer to Perl/Ruby/Smalltalk/Python than any of them are
to Java, and while I don't know whether it is supported on the specific
platforms you want, it is widely supported including on the Palm. It
also has the Palm OS support that all current versions of Python on the
Palm are sorely lacking. (Look for Plua, most likely the most recent
Plua2 beta...)

-Peter