Symbian and its partners today announced that OPL will become an Open Source project. The exact workings are still being worked out, but All About Symbian will be involved in the planning. Various Symbian partners have indicated that they will be looking to assist the current Development Team in porting OPL to the Series 60 and UIQ devices.
So what does all this mean? The first thing is that OPL has not died. There is a large pool of hobby developers out there who want to get started in programming using a simple to learn language (exactly what OPL was designed for). Symbian have always acknowledged this in private, but have had to take into account certain business considerations, which has held up developmet of OPL.
This barrier has now been removed, with interested parties to be given access to the source code; and with other experienced Tools Vendors and Partners offering to support OPL, it would be fair to say that OPL is shortly going to be the language that belongs to the community - which can only be of benefit. It should be able to be ported with minimal effort onto the Series 60 range of machines, and a P800 port is a strong possibility.
Now, before you all run off to the Symbian Website to download the code, be aware that although it has been announced, the mechanisms are not yet in place. I suspect that there will something akin to Sourceforge set up, and while you can all have a go at compiling the runtime, there will always be an 'official' Symbain version (similar to the way Linux is developed at the moment).
My opinion is that the Partner Companies working with Symbian are going to be the ones that will want to have a look at the code as soon as possible, with an eye to bringing it up to a beta release on various devices. They recognise where the Hobby Developer fits into the community, and certainly these last few month have shown that the hobby developers are being welcomed back into the Symbian arena. Lets not forget Symbian have had a difficult year or two getting everything in place, and some things had to be deferred. OPL was one of them.
Trust me on this one guys, there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on, and All About Symbian will keep you all informed of the important developments as and when they happen. The first half of 2003 looks to be very interesting...
I'm still trying to close my mouth after reading this, it kinda hit the floor. What amazing news, and so very welcome. Just think of the possibilities this opens up.
Symbian deserve a great deal of priase for being prepared to open up the project like this. Its not every day you see something like this.
I'm still digesting this news, but what I see it meaning is OPL on future Symbian devices and therefore a very big hobby developer scene. Note also it probably be quite compatiable between devices (think Revo, 5, netBook differences). This will be huge.
That's, um, very good....
As for Symbian.....
Good one, open source has to be the way to go 😃. Its great to hear that there are enough developers out their to make it viable.
Now I wonder where we'll see it cropping up? Hopefully Series 60 and UIQ but will people also port it to Palm and Windows PDA's😉
Sorry, I claim the above post.
The funny thing is I was logged in?
While the thought of OPL on disparate platforms is appealing, there would be a LOT of coding work invovled, not least bevcause the other platforms are much ,more guarded about the OS code.
Anyway, I think I'd like the developers to concentrate on the Symbian smartphones for the moment. We can look at other machines and Operating Systems later if time permits....
No No! I'm not suggesting that effort should be diverted into other OS's it just that open source projects often seem to end up going cross platform. For example there may be a bunch of Palm developers who decide to do it.
What we really need is a basic editor, translator & runtime environment to exist IN ROM on ALL Symbian smartphone platforms & then the open source community can get to work producing all the extra clever bits. This way, ordinary users will have their appetite whetted by playing at programming with the built-in stuff (provided it's reasonably capable for writing real world programs). Bear in mind that most people don't download apps to their phones, let alone software development environments. Then when they're hooked, they can start to use the more advanced stuff that the community develops. This way critical mass might be acheived for it to take off. Perhaps other manufacturers might even include the basic OPL stuff in their ROMs for the other platforms. This is much the same as when happened with the old Psion machine (with their built-in OPL) & then the OPXs which people started to write
Hexkid,
That would be great in a perfect world, but it ain't gonna happen. Symbian isn't in a position to force the inclusion on ROM of anything - and as the majority of users aren't going to install third party apps, it's hard for handset manufacturers to justify it to carriers.
Put another way, while everyone here would love to see OPL runtime (and Appforge runtime come to think of it) in ROM, it is not going to happen through Symbian. Individual handsets may carry it at the manufacturers whim, but it will never be a standard install.
Carrying it on sites as a seperate installable runtime is quite simple. You load one sis file, and it says, you need this sis as well, go here to download achieves the following.
* OPL is available, so lots of developer and apps will come on board.
* Symbian and it's Partners are able to continue to support hobby developers
* I get to distribute Vexed on the 3650... :evil:
This solution is the best for all parties concerned, and I'm more than happy to support this. I hope you can all understand why.
Besides if you have the chance to code opl from your desktop, why use the stupid opl translator onthe 9210? 😛
But I aggree it would be nice to get the runtime in the rom
Ewan,
This is great news and you can now annoy more people with Vexed! 😃
However, apart from allowing an OPL runtime to be installed on multiple platforms which will allow OPL applications to be run on those platforms, what major difference will being open source bring? Is OPL going to be further developed as a language? Will we see things like visual editors (a la VB or OVAL) for OPL? Can OPL applications be made cross-platform compatible (ie, the same code can be run on an ER5 device with a touchscreen, an ER6 device without a touchscreen, etc.)?
I'm not so sure about the runtime in ROM?
It depends how often new versions of the runtime are going to be produced? Hopefully the Open Source project will be making regular improvements to OPL over time.
It would be great to see what the Project intends to do but I expect it will take some time to get everything running and agree a development plan. I expect the 1st priority is to port it to series 60 and then UIQ rather than improvments to OPL itself and its development environment.
Phew ! Now I can dig out all my old listings of stuff I did for my Psion Organiser 2 !!!!! 😃
Congratulations, Ewan ! The OLP Open Source Project , and you, were cited by "The Register", 06/12/2002 :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
Maybe, some months from now, the next news we will see in "The Register" : "Microsoft fears the OPL community". 😃
Roberto
Can OPL applications be made cross-platform compatible (ie, the same code can be run on an ER5 device with a touchscreen, an ER6 device without a touchscreen, etc.)?[/quote]
I believe that is already the case. About 80-90% of the code can run without changes. OPL will only have to support the most common permutations:
Touchscreen - Keyboard - Landscape (5mx, Revo, netBook)
Touchscreen - No-keyboard - Landscape or Portrait (netPad)
No-touchscreen - Keyboard - Landscape (Crystal)
Touchscreen - No-keyboard - Portrait (P800 and other UIQ)
No-touchscreen - No-keyboard - Portrait (Series 60, F2051)
remaining differences will only be relatively minor variations in screensizes, availability of special buttons e.g. CBAs, LEDs, number of colours etc.
However, OPXs will need to be produced for special features in each device, e.g. camera. There is for instance a barcode scanning opx for netpad.
Yep, the majority of code is very portable. WHen an S60 version appears, I'll discuss 9210/S60 issues - but basically as long as you avoid obscure OPX's then you only need to worry about screen size, and toolbars. So as long as you can switch out toolbars easily, and perhaps have your code get the screen width and height and do everything relative, then it is realtivly easy to port.
I think that it may be best that 9210 and S60 and UIQ opl apps are seperate donloads, rather than auto configuring themselves if for nithing else than it's a real headache for novice programmers to get their heads around.