Perl on Android

Last week we had a meeting in Haifa where SawyerX and myself gave a talk about programming Android using Perl. SawyerX wrote a report about it.

More than a month ago I bought an Archos 5 Internet Tablet with the excuse that I need it to learn how I can run Perl on it. It is really cool but I'll probably ruin your day saying that you actually don't need a real devices in order to try Perl on Android. After looking around the web site of Android you will quickly find your way to the Android developers page that directs you to the SDK.

One you have the SDK installed you can setup an emulator on your PC and you can do everything there and it is even easier to type on your computer and copy the files or even write directly on the emulator than to type on the real device.

Of course it is much cooler to walk around with a mobile phone or with an Internet Tablet and show your friends the applications you wrote, but it is a start.

For example after some fight with the device we managed to write a small script that would display the coordinates of your location as you walk around the city. With some more effort we could connect that with location specific data and display that information to you or even alert you when another Perl hacker is walking near-by.

I would not even mention ideas like locating pubs and similar establishments.

The code looks something like this:

  use Android;
  my $d = Android->new;
  for (1..10) {
  	my $loc = $d->getLastKnownLocation;
  	print "Long: $loc->{result}{longitude}  Lat: $loc->{result}{latitude}\n";
  	sleep 1;
  }