[Chicken-users] qt & dbus eggs

[Andrei Barbu]

Hi,

I'm working on getting chicken into shape for writing applications on
the Nokia N900. I've made a lot of changes to the qt egg over the past
few weeks if anyone is interested in a upgraded version.

Some highlights:
 - support for qobject attributes
 - qvariantlist and qvariant are supported so interfacing with qt is a
   lot more natural
 - removed the simple receiver and replaced it with an object that
   crafts the correct slot on request
 - arbitrary number of arguments to slots and support for some common
   argument types (although notably pointers aren't yet handled)
 - invoking arbitrary qt methods/signals/slots
 - support for qt-maemo (stackable windows and various information boxes)
 - it now builds in c++ so that making bindings is faster
 - qt-dbus is now supported so that polling isn't required, it too
   works with an arbitrary number of arguments and provides all of the
   basic capabilities: receiving/sending dbus signals, method
   invocation, and exposing methods over dbus
 - 0% cpu usage when idle so it's battery-friendly
 - it's debianized along with its dependencies so that it can be
   deployed to the n900
 - ported the dbus egg to version 4

qt-networking support should be in later today/tomorrow.

The updated qt & dbus eggs along with debianized versions of their
dependencies (easyffi, foreigners, matchable, miscmacros, protobj,
silex, and test) are at: http://0xab.com/code/n900-chicken.git
There's also a tiny script for quickly debianizing eggs with correct
dependencies, perhaps someone is interested in reviving the
debianization effort.

The qt egg is still a work in progress and there's a lot that needs to
change. It's stable and runs all of the examples (modulo api
changes) from the svn egg, it has a superset of the features, as well
as a new test suite. If there's any interest I can submit patches
against the svn version (for qt and/or dbus).

I'm new to low-level hacking with chicken, I'd appreciate any comments
if I've abused the ffi/gc in some horrendous/unsafe way.

If anyone else that has an n900 and wants to play with chicken, it's
easy. Take a look at http://0xab.com/n900 . I have a debian repository
with optified versions of chicken, chicken-qt and friends, along with
some example programs for it that show off things like stackable
windows and screen rotation.

As soon as I figure out how you document eggs these days I'll put up
some docs as well.



Andrei