I've been following the development of the Raspberry Pi computer, which is a small ARM based device costing only 25-30 euros. It is designed to plug into TVs, and is targeted at teaching kids to learn programming. I was excited to read today that the KidsRuby programming environment is running on a Raspberry Pi. You can read some of Liz's other blogs for more details about the Raspberry Pi's progress.

Recently I've been working on the smoke-gobject bindings in the evenings and weekends. Although I'm working on other things for my job at Codethink during the day, I'm sufficiently excited about these bindings to be unable to stop spending my free time on them. This is at the expense of working on the new version 3.0 of QtRuby sadly. I'll try to explain on this blog why I think the Smoke/GObject bindings will be important for the parties attending the forthcoming Desktop Summit to consider, and why I'm giving them a higher priority than Ruby.

A couple of years ago I started on a project to create a Qt language binding using the Gnome GObject Introspection libraries to generate QMetaObjects, so that it would be possible to base a language binding on a dynamic bridge between the two toolkits. I started a project in the KDE playground repo, and then Norbert Frese joined in with a companion project called go-consume that was based more on static C++ code generation.

I've been neglecting QtRuby recently, although I've wanted to do a major rewrite for some time. I finally bit the bullet last Thursday, and decided that I was going to take time off work and enter a hacking frenzy until the new version of QtRuby was well underway. After six days I've just got a 'hello world' working and commited the project to a 'qtruby-3.0' branch in the qtruby KDE repo.

Ryan Melton announced on the kde-bindings mailing list that he had set up a project on github called 'qtbindings' with the aim of doing cross-platform gems for QtRuby. This is great news, and congratulations to Ryan for making it happen

Ryan announced:

By and large I don't really care about what Microsoft do - I don't use their software, and I actively avoid making my career dependent on them. But I am a fan of the C# programming language and think the Qyoto/Kimono bindings for the Qt and KDE apis are pretty neat.

Can Ruby do for Qt and KDE application development what it did with Rails for web development? With the Qt on Rails project we're attempting to achieve this - using the clean domain logic and conventions of Rails combined with the brilliant application framework and widget set of Qt. An early 0.1 version has just been released; rough around the edges but enough to show the potential of the idea. We've focused on making Qt on Rails easy to install so that you can experiment with it for yourself. Now that it's easy to do so, go do it! We need your help and ideas!

I've just added an idea for a Google Summer of Code project to the wiki; a Language Bindings Documentation Extractor/Generator tool.

I'm sorry about the unwieldy title to this blog - I couldn't think of a shorter snappier way of putting it, but I'll try explain the tricky problem with 'C++ implicit type conversions' that I've managed to solve.

I've recently added a handy command line tool for introspecting the methods in Smoke libraries. Although it is mainly aimed at people using Smoke based language bindings, I think it might be more generally useful and worth describing to a wider audience.

Show all the methods in the QPoint class: