Towards eased debugging of Python applications on Maemo platform

Dynamic languages have recently been gaining a lot of attention, especially in the context of user-developed software. Systems such as Python indeed enable an approach where the developer composes code that can be run by a virtual machine in source code form, omitting steps like compilation and linking. Unfortunately only limited support for debugging such applications is commonly available, especially in the context of mobile devices where the traditional debugging approach relying on a command window and keyboard is unfavorable. In this paper, we introduce experiences on developing a debugging environment for the Maemo platform with the dynamic language Python. The experiment has been conducted with Nokia N810 devices that provide reasonable performance and use Linux as the underlying operating system. However, as the majority of the work has been carried out using Python, we believe that the results can be generalized to other devices capable of running Python as well.