Congratulations to Richard Milewski for taking the initiative to carry out some additional experimentation with the “Symbian on Symbian” web runtime application written by Ivan Litovski.
As Richard writes today in his article, The Current Best Hope for Cross-Platform Mobile Development:
On mobile devices, widgets are essentially websites that have been bundled and loaded onto the phone. They provide a rapid development environment using largely standardized web technologies; AJAX, HTML, CSS and Javascript…
[Different mobile operating system platforms] all use similar approaches…
This got me wondering. If all of these various widget environments really are based on standards, how close to a cross-platform solution are widgets in their current state? To find out, I conducted a quick 15 minute experiment. I downloaded the Symbian-on-Symbian WRT from Symbian.org’s developer site and dropped it into a PhoneGap Xcode project.
My goal was to see how large the error count would be when I tried to compile the project. To my surprise the answer was zero! PhoneGap compiled and Xcode loaded it onto my iPhone…
The fact that so much can be accomplished in just a 15 minute experiment (even though not all the functionality works) will surely encourage others to experiment further.
As already expressed indirectly in the other thread, it is paramount to keep the standard open and interchangeable.
I would love to see a core WRT-compatibility across all phone developers and then extra features according to specific manufacturers or uses. For example the Samsung i8910 HD extends their functionality on its Touch Widget UI.
Good. But how many times have we been bitten by the small % of functionality that doesn’t work or differs slightly.
If you start using S60 specific APIs to interact with local services or libraries then it is no longer portable.
The fact that javascript is not complied means that you will find the compatibility issues at runtime.
I guess my point is that one should be careful about overselling the benefits of a “cross platform solution” It sets the wrong expectation and inevitably leads to disappointment if the solutions fail to live up to it.
On another note. Is Symbian actively developing the next web browser with HTML5.0 support?
I suppose both browsers are based on webkit which must help.
No EDUROAM – NO NOKIA…
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=98362
Hi Chankete,
As the source code becomes open source, it will be much easier for third parties to add in code for any protocols that are missing.
// David W.