The PalmPDK includes a toolchain of GCC in order to build C and C++ applications, and Python is a nice one. The idea behind this is to allow webOS to run Python apps, but what is more important for my is PyGame. If Python is able to run in webOS and PyGame works without much modifications, then a lot of game can be ported to webOS, and very nice applications can be done.
I wrote this idea in the Palm WebOS C/C++ a long time ago, and after a few tries without success, Thomas Perl got it working with the help of the WebOS Internals PDK http://thp.io/2011/webos/) He did a great job there, and also he is making a library for binding the Plug-In API using SWIG.
My idea now that this is working, and it works nice as you can see in Thomas’ website, is to create a “Python environment” application and a “template application”. The Python environment application will just check if you have the lastest binaries of Python + PyGame inside your SD Card (The complete Python and PyGame lib is nearly 27MBytes). If not, it will download it, and install in on the SD Card.
Once this is done, then it comes the time for the “template application”. This will be a standard SDL project, that will check if you have the “Python environment”. If not it will redirect you to the App. Catalog in order to install it. But if you have it, it will launch “main.py”, a file bundled in this project from where you can start writing your own python application.
The idea behind this is to make Python a popular language for creating games and application for WebOS. May be in a future even it’s bundled by default in WebOS and this will turn into a nice experience but useless. Until that happens, this solution seems to be very good.