The Wireless Developer Network has posted an excellent article about the Open Source OPL Project and how our own contributer Ewan Spence started the ball rolling. It says that the Symbian licensees are backing the project and describes how they think it will improve the development opportunities for their products. A full progress report is to be given at the Symbian Exposium at the end of April. OPL is a easy to use Basic like language originally used in PSION handhelds.
Open Source OPL project.
This is great news. I would love to be able to knock up simple programs, quickly & easily, in-situ on my phone, wherever I happen to be, rather than having to use a full-blown Java or C++ SDK on a PC, then download it to the phone.
The only trouble is, there aren't many smartphones these day with decent keyboards. I'd like to see the next iteration of Nokia's Series 80. Perhaps a new version of the Communicator or a completely new device. And perhaps some other manufacturers will wake up to the fact that data-centric devices like these really need good text input.
The ideal would be an up-to-date device of the Psion 5mx genre.
But back to OPL.
I'd also like to see some OPXs which handle some of the common tasks (UI elements & the like) at a much higher level than has been done so far.
As I understnad it, you should be able to edit OPL code on your device as they are based around standard .txt files. On device like Sereis 60 you'll probably want to write on soemthing else and send the text file over unless you have a really good thumb.
OPX's... well you should get all the 'standard' ones and because it's Open Source you might be able to easily create and modify your own to do whatever you want.
FYI the menu's and dialogs are device dependent, so the Series 60 menus will be written 'from scratch' as opposed to cross-over, but I await the results with interest.
Now is the begginning of the future as far as the hobby developer is concerned. OPL is the easiest and cheapest route into programming for a mobile device, and with the route into open source (and hopefully some handy developer support 😉) this option will be open to both series 60 devices and UIQ.
And once it's Open Source, can we have a sacrificial C++ programmer to cross compile it for Pocket PC? 8)
Then Palm then Linux 😮 😮 😮
Today the 9200's tomorrow :evil:
Any chance of these being ported?
There is a port of Perl 5.6
to the Psion 5 and Ruby to Epoc32.
I don't think they will work on the 9290.
Maybe someone should also add a link to the OPL runtime and the OPL tutorials?
Ciao!
WOO HOO!!!!
OPL was one of the first programming languages I learnt, it's very capable when it comes to business type apps. This makes me soo happy to hear it's coming back... In your face micro$hite visual basic :P .