Guest post by “As Nokia has dropped MeeGo as its primary smartphone platform, the MeeGo architects have taken the opportunity to change some of their plans for the mobile Linux. In a posting to the MeeGo architecture lists, Intel developer Arjan van de Ven, said that “just not everything is clear yet around ‘who’ and ‘what'”, but that there were some final decisions the architects were prepared to make.”
So basically they are just doing what they should have done in the first place by using mature projects for the backends instead of reinventing the wheel although none of those is nearly as bad a conman (which they don’t seem to be replacing)
A group faced with resource starvation is generally forced to take hard looks at what it’s doing. Sometimes it’s good for the project. In this case it probably is since maemo/meego has been wandering around for a while going nowhere.
I’m probably the only one right now who’s excited at the prospect of a MeeGo tablet. And this coming from a webOS fan. But the reasoning is simple: it provides a more flexible development environment than just about anything else out there short of Windows 7. Qt along with the awesome sauce that is Qt Quick (QML) is a first-class citizen, which on its own is reason for celebration as the declarative script syntax is just awesome for building UIs fast. (I say this based on my experience using JavaFX script, for which the syntax is almost identical.) On top of that you can take almost *any existing Linux app*, do a little UI/interaction modification on it and *bam* you’ve got a tablet app! How awesome is that? Apparently it’s even possible to get Java SE to run on this thing, so if I wanted to I could even write an app in JavaFX, Scala or Groovy. Mono/.NET, Python, whatever floats your boat, likewise no problem.
The true power of the Linux desktop, on a mobile device. Think about that for a moment. It’s pretty awesome.
I’m frankly not sure we want a bunch of retread linux desktop apps on a tablet (in fact I know I don’t). This hasn’t worked well for windows based tablets, and they haven’t worked well on maemo.
That’s why I sort of appreciate what android and apple did…they made it such that you had to develop new apps.
Including having to redo application logic from scratch. I suspect most people wouldn’t just do a straight port, but the ability to reuse some if not all of the business logic done in Qt is a big plus…
Not a developer, I presume?
Where I come from, code reuse (not UI reuse) is seen as a plus.
Why? Many are waiting for Meego tablets and smartphones, which will have real Linux and not some VM on top of an incompatible kernel.