Symbian's continued support of OPL for 92xx

Hi,

I had a meeting a few weeks ago with Symbian regarding OPL, and the impression I had was that if there is a groundswell of people supporting OPL, then they will support it and look at moving it to other machines.

This is one of the reasons Rafe and I instigated the OPL Developers Section and Competition. If there is a good number of applications entered (and therefore released into the public domain) then the 3rd Party Development Team have a good business case to approach Symbian Management.

After that, while they can release oPL via www.symbian.com, it would be much more useful if the Manufacturers (Nokia, SE, etc) would build hte runtime in the device. That would need a LOT of OPL out there.

So if you want Symbian to support OPL, then I'm afraid you'll have to bite the bullet and learn it first before getting full support. My view is if we get a good number of entries, then support will be forthcoming.

In the meantime, we can all do our best to help each other.

Ewan,

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I would just comment that it appears that this OPL 'alpha/beta' has been around for a good while now; I'm just a little surprised that Symbian don't at least give some indication of how the adoption is going, even if only every six months. But I do see that they upgraded it at some point, so that's positive, even if was mostly bug fixes.

I see that some software providers are now relying on the continuance of OPL for their entire commercial software libraries. Surely Symbian won't be pulling the rug from dedicated publishers like this?

OPL seems to be powerful enough for some popular apps on the 9210; are we all going to be forced to grapple with C++ or Appforge just to get into the market?

Sure, the day they include the runtime in the OS is the day you can take it to the bank, I guess.

Thanks!

Hi,

My opinion : I think that OPL for Nokia 92xx is already good enough to make programming utilities, applications, games, etc. It remains some small details yet to be implemented (full suport of synchronous sounds, etc). I think it would be against any logic if Symbian abandon OPL on Nokia 92xx, because almost 100% of the work of porting it is already done.

The main question is about OPL support on Series 60, UIQ, and other futur Symbian interfaces. If there is not a good number of OPL programs developed on Nokia 92xx, then Symbian will leave the "spare-time" programmers with only one option, Java (J2ME), as the light-weight language.

Regards,

Roberto