Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

After complaining about the dubious SDK release announcement that ACCESS made at 3GSM, I saw that Ton van Overbeek did manage to dig up the SDK (or at least a version of it) on a public ACCESS server. At the time I am posting this there is a 500MB tgz archive named sdk.tgz there that seems pretty complete.

Here's the direct link to the SDK archive.

Update: As of today (April 26) they removed access to the file. I did say this was unannounced!

It looks like the contents of the archive are date-stamped Mar 13, 2007, and the fact that we still don't hear any horns blowing (plus a word to this effect from an ACCESS exec I checked with) suggests that they are still revving to get to the golden release. Good for them. Nothing wrong with taking the time to get it all right at this stage—and I do understand that they are working with some members of the developer community to do this. The problem is the pretense that the release was on Feb 12.

Looking at the package manifest I can see we have the following, packaged to run in a Debian-based Linux distro like Ubuntu:

• ALP Development Suite based on Eclipse CDT (familiar to PODS users)
• Scratchbox development environment for ALP
• Scratchbox arm-gcc3.4.4 and i486-gcc3.4.4 toolchains for ALP
• User-mode Linux (UML) a kind of virtual machine that runs Linux as a user process under another Linux kernel. Includes userspace utilities like uml_mconsole, uml_moo, uml_switch, uml_net and tunctl.
• ALP Simulator, based on UML kernel
• ALP GDB for debugging both ARM and UML targets from Scratchbox
• ALP UI Builder based on Glade-3 with MAX widget set integration (based on the development snapshot of Glade-3 from gnome.org)
• Rootstraps for booting the ARM device and UML simulator
• Java runtime for the ALP Development Suite (i.e. for running the tools themselves, not for running Java ME stuff)
• Documentation for both open source and ALP middleware components, including a Getting Started page for first time users
• Sample projects that illustrate GTK and GLADE widget usage and good coding practices (clean, commented, formatted)

I'm busy on other stuff right now, but I'm eager to take a look at this as soon as I get a chance. I want to get the new Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu up and running on one of my dev boxes.

I got a positive impression of ALP and the early version of the Developer Suite I tried out last August. It's going to be interesting to see how Palm OS developers respond when Palm and ACCESS each start shipping separate Linux-based operating systems with Palm OS emulation in them.