Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

When Sun announced JavaFX yesterday, most of the Java developers present (being predominantly web developers) thought it was Sun's answer to Adobe Flash, with a mobile sidekick akin to Flash Lite. But the mobile side of the equation is much more interesting than that. JavaFX Mobile is actually a complete smartphone platform designed to compete directly with platforms like Windows Mobile and Symbian OS. Sun is not just delivering some flashy media APIs and tools on top of Java MIDP, here—the JavaFX Mobile runtime includes a Linux kernel and services, telephony services from their recent SavaJe acquisition, and a CDC Java runtime that is a very full-featured subset of Java SE.

Alert readers will recognize the handset that Sun exec Rich Green is using to demo JavaFX Mobile is the FIC Neo 1973, a smartphone which runs the OpenMoko Linux distro. I got a chance to sit down with Sun CTO Bob Brewin yesterday to talk with him about JavaFX and he confirmed that the platform will be open sourced "as soon as possible" so that developers can start working with it on current mobile Linux devices like the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet and the Neo 1973. I'm guessing it won't be a big deal to port this to other mobile Linux platforms like ALP or Palm's new Linux OS(es)—for smartphones and the new device class they say they are announcing at the end of the month. When it comes to flashy animation and user interaction it looks (from a distance at least) like JavaFX could deliver the iPhone experience on all kinds of mobile Linux devices, which should be something for readers here to be excited about. :-)

Gotta get to my next JavaOne session now. They're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics: OSGi on mobile devices. See ya!

Update: Once I got out of range of Sun's reality distortion field and saw the silly iPhone comparisons starting to emerge across the blogosphere I had some more sober thoughts about JavaFX Mobile. You can read these here.

Either I misread something or ACCESS made a quick change in their web site, but I noticed last night that the Inside Track program from which you can apply for early access to the new ALP Development Suite is no longer a paid subscription: it's free. Still no guarantee that you'll be invited to try the new SDK during this early release phase, but at least you don't have to pony up for a $150 lottery ticket.

Apply for Inside Track here.

ACCESS has finally released, in a limited way, a software developer kit for the ACCESS Linux Platform. According to a newsletter they sent to developers yesterday:

The Development Suite provides an early look at all the tools needed to build and debug a native ACCESS Linux Platform mobile application and test it on the included ACCESS Linux Platform™ Simulator. The suite contains the IDE, debugger, code editor, and reference documentation, and supports the C programming language.

The hitch is that initially this is only available by invitation to select developers that have joined the (paid) free Inside Track program. Inside Track is an early access and marketing partnership program that dates back to a year before PalmSource was acquired by ACCESS. Since development of Palm OS Garnet and Cobalt hasn't been very active post-acquisition and since we don't have ALP devices yet to market software for I would guess that a lot of Palm developers have let their memberships lapse. If you sign up now you might have a decent chance of being tapped as one of the first developers who can start writing applications for the new platform!

I think it would be a great idea if when ACCESS opens the SDK up to everyone they release a reference handset like Trolltech and FIC are doing. The Haier N60 seems to be one they are using in-house, so why not sell it unlocked off their web site?

Corrected Feb 7, 2007

[updated Fri 12/22/06]
ACCESS just released an application framework for the ACCESS Linux Platform under the Mozilla Public License. This doesn't include the GUI toolkit, which is a modification of GTK+, but there's a lot there for Palm and Linux developers to sink their teeth into. It's called the Hiker Application Framework, and you can download the code and documentation here.

In a press release at the end of October, ACCESS explained their motivation for releasing this and described what the next step is now that the framework has been contributed to the Linux community:

By open sourcing the Application Framework, ACCESS’ goal is to help speed the development and adoption of mobile Linux phones and devices while taking the first step to help prevent fragmentation. The next step in preventing fragmentation will be to work with industry standards organizations, such as the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum and Open Source Developers Labs (OSDL) to determine how they may adopt the Application Framework.

I'm impressed and pleased that ACCESS is opening the source this far up the software stack. Between the Hiker Application Framework and libsqlfs (the SQLite-based persistance API that ACCESS released earlier) they have opened up a very broad swath of the software that application developers will use on a daily basis. Even just in a quick scan of the documentation I can see the hand of the original Palm OS developers who, more than just about anyone, understand what it takes to make a good user experience on a mobile device. That's hopeful to me.

This work is at least as important as lower level contributions to things like power management, since this is the level at which standards need to be established to enable native applications to run across multiple mobile Linux platforms. And that is what will determine whether Linux can create an ecosystem that competes effectively against the big proprietary platforms: Symbian and Windows Mobile.

ACCESS also offered what I think is some exemplary thinking about the software experience on a phone in contrast to a PC:

Smartphones and mobile devices have small form factors with limited memory, storage and display space, and as a result, these devices must do things differently than a PC. Furthermore, the usage model for smartphones and mobile devices is very different than a PC, typically made up of short tasks interrupted by many events such as receiving calls or messages while browsing.

Users tend to concentrate on tasks rather than applications. For example, the user will take a picture and send it, rather than launch a camera application and spend a lot of time in it. This difference affects how mobile applications need to be represented and launched, how they inter-communicate, and what resources they require. The Application Framework from ACCESS has been designed to address these needs.

I've been developing a new task-oriented user interface for my Treo that's designed to get away from the idea of application "silos." It's amazing how much this PC concept limits a phone from doing some powerful things ONLY because of the bad UI. I'm very eager to see what ACCESS and the old Palm OS team from PalmSource have come up with.

Anyway, I haven't had much time to look through the code that ACCESS delivered, but I did get a chance to scan through the short "whitepaper" that's included and the much more detailed Technical Overview. Afterward I had a few questions that Maureen O'Connell at ACCESS agreed she'd try to get answers to. Check back after the New Year.

Last Thursday I posted that based on an oblique reference in a single sentence from a statement on the ACCESS web site the schedule for delivery of the ACCESS Linux Platform seems to have slipped. Since that time this got repeated on at least 20 different blogs, portals and mainstream Internet media outlets. Today I had a chance to speak with Maureen O'Connell, Senior Director of Worldwide Communications at ACCESS, who told me that contrary to the impression created by the recent FAQ they published there really isn't any delay. ACCESS has in fact already delivered an early release of their Platform Developer Kit to a number of companies, as they stated they would before year's end.

I put a few questions to Maureen to clarify this:

What exactly has ACCESS delivered to prospective licensees at this time?

We have delivered an early release of the PDK. Early-release means the PDK is not packaged yet and therefore requires more support from ACCESS than once we reach the commercial stage. The early-release PDK does enable licensees to start developing products based on the ACCESS Linux Platform.

How is this different from what the recent ACCESS FAQ states they expect to deliver in the first half of 2007?

Because this is an early release, not all the components are included, and some of the included components are not complete yet.

Is this pre-release version of the ACCESS Linux Platform intended to be primarily for evaluation purposes or does ACCESS expect that it is complete enough for vendors to begin developing products based on ALP?

The pre-release PDK does enable licensees to start developing products based on the ACCESS Linux Platform.

ACCESS announced at the end of October that they would be contributing an open source application framework to give mobile Linux a standard way to install, manage and secure applications on mobile devices. Are they on track to release this by year's end as announced?

Yes.

Cool. I'll be looking forward to seeing that drop.

I did let her know that I felt it would be a good idea for ACCESS to, uh, keep the Palm OS faithful apprised of their progress whenever they have an opportunity to do so.

The genie is out of the bottle. The first totally open source mobile phone will hit the market with no carrier strings attached for a fairly astonishing $350 in January. Yes, next month.

OK, it looks a little weird, but it sounds like developers are going to have an absolute field day with this one. Taiwanese consumer electronics giant First International Computer is doing for smartphones what Nokia did last year for Internet tablets.

• The OS and middleware (called "OpenMoKo") are 100% open source and hackable (based on a Linux 2.6 kernel, GTK+, X Windows, Matchbox, etc.)
• The hardware sounds sweet: big, apparently VGA touchscreen, quad band radio, GPS receiver that's wired up to the application framework, 128MB of memory (64MB available for apps)
• The phone is unlocked GSM so you don't need anyone's permission to have your way with it: just drop in your SIM card and go.
• The OpenMoko framework includes an "apt-get-like" application manager—only with a nice graphical user interface so that users can subscribe to the applications they like almost like subscribing to an RSS feed (see below)

The architecture diagram shows not just a Linux smartphone, but a platform that will run native X11 apps just like a desktop computer, as well as native apps that interface with the OpenMoko middleware layer. You're not going to be able to run the GIMP on this guy, but with the platform wide open you've got all the rope you need to hang yourself with whatever subset of GTK+ you dare include:


I don't see how this thing is going to commercialize for FIC, and it doesn't do anything to address the fragmentation problem that vexes mobile Linux, but it sure looks like a Linux hobbyist's dream smartphone. I'll be first in line when they start selling them in January.

Yeah, I know. The phone looks ridiculous, and where are the hardware buttons? That must be the part that the Chinese government designed. :-(

For more, see LinuxDevices.com and this presentation given at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Amsterdam today.

Update: The Inquirer has a piece on the OpenMoKo phone that's worth a read as well, adding some additional technical details.

Quietly inserted in a FAQ about the freshly inked deal with Palm over expanded rights to the Palm OS Garnet source code, ACCESS includes this brief statement:

We will announce the official name of the ACCESS Linux Platform when we announce that it is available to our licensees and developers—expected sometime in the first half of 2007.

That's behind schedule from what was promised back in February of this year. Sigh... I guess ALP is in good company with about 90% of the big software projects out there that are behind schedule.

It's disappointing to see delays like this, of course. But given the trouble that similar Linux platforms like Maemo and QTopia have had with getting acceptable performance, memory usage and battery life out of the mobile devices that run them you have to wonder if it's an altogether bad thing to have an extra half year for Moore's Law to do its work. One of these days I need to get my hands on the Linux-powered Motorola Ming and see how that holds up to the high expectations people have for responsiveness and stability of their smartphones.

LinuxDevices has a very nice article by John Lombaro about developing software for Trolltech's reference Linux phone, the Greenphone. It's a breezy blow-by-blow account that starts with "I shuddered with anticipation as I opened the Fedex package" containing the phone, and moves on to installing the development environment (which cleverly runs inside a VMWare player) to getting the BusyBox command prompt to the phone from the PC, to writing, building and deploying "Hello World" to the device.

The author likes that the SDK is delivered as a VMWare virtual machine, which "makes the development environment cross platform, easy to update, ensures all developers have the same toolset and eliminates a lot of frustration when installing the toolchain." And he likes that it includes an emulated environment that is hosted on your development PC. On the down-side, he can't recommend using the phone as your regular mobile (and neither does Trolltech) and he wonders if the $700 price tag will put off the kind of un-paid, scratch-your-own-itch-motivated developers that constitute much of the Linux developer community. Also the source code to the applications on the phone is not provided.

As someone who learned Palm OS development by poring over the source code to the built-in Palm OS apps, I can tell you that last point is a bummer. Apparently, there are licensing issues. It makes me wonder how much we'll get to see of what'll be in ROM in phones running the ACCESS Linux Platform when the SDK comes out next year. I hope they recognize (as PalmSource has in the past) the importance of having not just good documentation, but complete source code for several of the ROM applications that demonstrate best practices.

If like me you're interested in getting your feet wet with mobile Linux development, see also Flash Sheridan's intriguing piece on getting started with developing for ALP.

There are more mobile Linux vendors (or handset vendors using Linux) than you can shake a stick at these days—enough that some analysts feel Linux has already trounced Windows Mobile in its share of the smartphone market. But we have yet to see a complete mobile Linux platform hit the market: something that would be quick for even a small- to medium-sized handset vendor to integrate into new hardware because most of the integration issues have already been worked out. Something that has a full native software stack and rich APIs for adding third party applications. Something comparable to Microsoft Windows Mobile or Nokia S60.

ACCESS looks like theirs will be the first to hit the market with an SDK they say will be shipped to vendors by year's end. Motorola and friends have announced their own, which may or may not be the kind of complete "tall stack" solution that ACCESS is attempting. Then there's a la Mobile, which kind of flew in out of the blue and is a bit of an unknown (not really sure if they're doing real smartphones or feature phones). But now Trolltech has announced that they will release a mobile Linux platform that combines the venerable QTopia framework with what LinuxDevices.com calls "a menu of pre-integrated browsers, Java virtual machines, messaging clients, and other software, along with complete source code and branding flexibility." It sounds a lot like the ACCESS Linux Platform to me, which one might argue is a market validation of ACCESS's approach of delivering "the whole ball of wax" to its licensees and keeping their integration load to a minimum. "Validation" is mostly a nice way of saying "here comes the competition," of course! Trolltech says their "Greensuite" platform will be released in Q2 2007.

One thing that really grabbed me about the Greensuite announcement is its "Safe Execution Environment" (SXE). The idea is that developers will be able to provide end users with native applications that are sufficiently sandboxed that they do not have to undergo a time-consuming and costly testing and certification process. I expect that SXE probably exhibits some of the same tradeoffs between security and power/flexibility that we see with today's Java ME environments. But let's hope that in the same way MIDP 3.0's sandbox is being expanded, the carriers will accept handsets with native execution environments that give developers the power and freedom they need to develop the really cool apps.

If Trolltech can deliver a safe execution environment that doesn't cut developers off at the knees, I'm praying with all Palm developers that ACCESS ships ALP with a similar environment. Expecting developers to spend the time and money to certify all their applications and then recertify them with each carrier every time they roll out an update is a great way to squelch innovation—something ACCESS can ill afford to do if they want their platform to prosper against the competition. When ACCESS opens the source of their application framework next month we may have a better idea where we stand with this. I hope for ACCESS' sake that the news is more encouraging on this certification issue than were some of my conversations on the topic with PalmSource folks back in August.

Last Wednesday I went to the PalmSource Developer Day at LinuxWorld San Francisco to check out PalmSource's progress on their new Linux-based mobile OS. I really should have flown in a day early because there was so much mobile Linux action happening on the expo floor and I barely was able to scratch the surface. Someone summed up this year's conference as being all about "stacks". I'd go one further and say "mobile stacks." PalmSource was sharing a lot of detailed information about their ACCESS Linux Platform and had demo phones and developer tools you could try out; an upstart called à la Mobile was touting a competing Linux platform; and then there were the incumbents, Motorola and Trolltech all jostling for position in the new and (dare I say it?) explosive mobile Linux phone market.

PalmSource was the big news, though. They had their native Linux platform running on real phones and finally starting to look like the modern successor to the Palm OS that many of us have been looking for. They also have their developer tools pretty well put together--enough for Linux and Palm OS hackers to design, code, and debug native Linux apps during three one-hour tutorial sessions using PalmSource provided Ubuntu laptops. I've published the first of three promised articles about my impressions of ALP on PalmInfocenter, but I thought I'd give a more developer-centric run-down here and offer up a Guy Kawasaki-style top ten list. So without further ado, here's my Top 10 Things for Developers to Love About ALP (Besides the Fact That It's Linux):

1. ALP is standards-based. PalmSource has learned its lesson from the Palm OS Cobalt debacle, during which time they seemed to believe that everything had to be built from the ground up, in house. Apparently innoculated for NIH Syndrome by Linux, they are now using lots of tools and SDKs that are familiar, proven, open source standards. Some of these deserve their own places in the top ten list. For example...
2. ALP is X Windows. Until now we didn't know whether they would put X on a crash diet or try to do the GUI on a direct-to-frame-buffer basis. Ultimately, they went with X and I've heard cheers from many corners about this decision. It makes porting existing Linux applications to ALP much easier and is probably a big chunk of well-tested code that PalmSource doesn't have to maintain by itself. There's probably some hit to performance and memory, but ACCESS considers it's top competitor to be Windows Mobile which has positively huge memory requirements. X will be worth its weight.
3. ALP is GTK+. That thing I just said about how easy it is to port a Linux app to ALP? I mean easy as in a simple recompile. Now, granted we're not talking about compiling The Gimp to run on your phone, or many other substantial desktop applications written against the Gnome toolkit. This is a phone with limited memory, a small screen, maybe a touchscreen (but maybe not) in the hand of someone walking around town doing stuff. But in one of the developer sessions we took a stock Linux app called gWorldClock and rebuilt it for ALP without touching a line of code. GTK makes good sense on an embedded Linux system since it's layered and modular, unlike QT, which from what I understand is more monolithic. From a development standpoint, using GTK means you can design your GUIs with Glade, which seems like a nice graphical tool from the short time I've used it (reminds me of Constructor but with layouts). GTK also means you're developing in C instead of C++. I don't know about the rest of you but while I like OOP, C++ doesn't do it for me!
4. ALP is legacy Palm OS, too. Well, we already knew that ALP would include built-in emulation of Palm OS Garnet. What we didn't know is how good this emulation will be. We still don't really, but I tried some of my own Palm OS apps in GHost and they ran just fine. Every other Palm developer I've spoken with (four of them) had the same experience (unless their app required Treo-specific libraries from Palm). I mentioned in my PalmInfocenter article that I didn't see a Graffiti input area for handwriting recognition in the simulator, but developer Donald Kirker who saw some Palm apps running on the demo phones assured me that the 240 x 320 screen included a dynamic input area as we've come to expect on Palm devices with rectangular screens. Looking good.
5. ALP gets multitasking right. I know some people will differ with me on this one, but many, if not most mobile applications have no business taking up memory in a background thread once you leave them to run another application. ALP being Linux, it enables full multitasking: you can start an MP3 playing, then tell your RSS reader to get the latest blog posts, then check your To Do list while the other tasks continue merrily in the background. You can even pop up a little control panel from the status bar to skip to the next music track while you watch your RSS feeds load in the window behind. But the music player and RSS reader can do this because they were written to do so, not because it's the default behavior like with Symbian or Windows Mobile. The default behavior of a native ALP application is to exit (perhaps saving state to an application prefs database) and to give its memory back for the system to run the applications you care about. PalmSource was wise to leave this decision to the developer, who in turn could offer the choice to the user by popping up a quick dialog before the application closes. Phones are resource constrained devices and running out of memory is one of the most common causes of crashes or other poor behavior.
6. ALP is a daemon lover. So, if you choose, your application can go from the active GUI thread into a background thread. Cool. But it's also possible to write apps that run completely headless. Daemons, as they're known in the Linux world. I'm not to sure how this will pan out, but it strikes me as a powerful thing to have services that run silently in the background, fetching live data off a network or GPS and updating a database for instantaneous access by one or more GUI applications. I've written here before about the need for a mobile service-oriented platform that stops developers from having to write the same code over and over. It seems like Linux daemons could be a fertile ground for growing a rich service ecosystem. What about a tiny web server or application server? Sounds crazy at first, but these could open up some creative and powerful new ways to use a wirelessly connected device.
7. ALP is themable. It took entering a single tag in a manifest file to turn a drab, gray-looking GTK application into a richly themed one with colors, shapes, fonts, borders and backgrounds that matched all the other native apps running in the simulator. Themes are developed with scalable vector graphics so they can adjust to devices with different screen sizes. Should be fertile ground for user personalization. But the SVGs may be pre-rendered on the device for performance reasons, so don't expect Mac OSX-like dynamic resizing of GUI elements while you move the stylus around.
8. Eclipse and Scratchbox are your friends. Readers know I'm fond of Eclipse, but I've really only used it for Java development. I was pleasantly surprised with the C development toolkit that forms the basis of PalmSource's new IDE, though. Users of the Palm OS Developer Suite will find it familiar, too. But what they won't find is the pain that so many experienced when they installed PODS on a Windows machine with another Cygwin installation: PODS screwed it up every time. Not anymore. First of all, if you're developing for ALP you'll be developing on Linux, not Windows, so no more Cygwin. But you'll also be using a cross-compilation tool called Scratchbox that enables you to have one build environment configured for ARM Linux and ALP while your host environment is set up the way you need it for your x86 box. No more interference.
9. ALP's got a browser widget. Until now ACCESS has been best known for their powerful, Javascript-enabled, SVG-rendering mobile web browser, NetFront. That browser will now be integrated right into the ALP platform and even available as a widget to include in third party applications. Officially, this is only for internal use by ACCESS in developing their own applications like the standby screen and maybe the email client. But I've been told that a browser control will also be exposed as API at some point. Palm developers have sorely missed something like this.
10. ALP has an SQL database engine. SQLite has been improved and becomes the standard for persisting data on ALP. Not only can you query with SQL, but the database even has a POSIX-style file system API that you can use with it. Palm OS developers who have had to roll their own relational database logic will cheer that they now have a fast and powerful RDBMS built right into the platform.
11. ACCESS is aggressive. PalmSource, with its PDA pedigree, was a babe in the woods when it came to dealing with mobile phones and network operators. Not ACCESS. They already do business with most of the carriers and ODMs since their browser and other software is very widely deployed. They are also ambitious, publicly stating their expectation to have their software on fully 30% of all mobile handsets within six years. Note, this doesn't necessarily mean they expect ALP to be on all those handsets: ACCESS is counting its browser and other software products, too. But after spending some time speaking with CTO Dr. Tomihisa Kamada, it's clear that ACCESS expects ALP to be a major factor in extending this reach.
12. ACCESS is interested in more than just phones. They already have software for automobile telematics and home entertainment devices, and they expect to extend Linux and parts of the ALP SDK into these and other kinds of consumer devices. Dr. Kamada confirmed my suspicions that ACCESS sees mobile phones not just as communication devices, but as remote controls for your home and ways to extend home entertainment systems outside the confines of your home. I like developing for a platform with a big vision behind it.

Ok, I lied. That's twelve things for developers to love about ALP. Naturally, there are some clouds on the horizon, too, including the big question of whether Palm Inc will use ALP on future devices. I'll look at some of those in my next post. But overall, I am pleasantly surprised with the progress PalmSource showed at last week's LinuxWorld and look forward to seeing how this platform evolves between now and when it's released to licensees around the end of the year. When will 3rd party developers be able to download the tools and start developing ALP applications? Officially, "the first half of 2007."

I've got very little time to blog right now, but man oh man has the mobile Linux PR machine built up a head of steam this week!

PalmSource is unveiling it's ACCESS Linux Platform (on an early access basis) to developers attending LinuxWorld on Wednesday. I'll be flying out tomorrow evening to check it out. Meanwhile, Europe's #2 mobile operator, Orange, has endorsed ALP as an "approved platform" and announced that it will release an Orange-branded "turnkey mobile Linux platform" based on ALP to handset vendors.

ACCESS and Orange will jointly work on the creation of this customized suite of applications, including third party applications. ACCESS will leverage its professional services team to help device vendors integrate this suite onto their design. This is expected to provide a time-to-market and compatibility advantage.

PalmSource is also announcing the rebirth of its successful developer program as the "ACCESS Developer Network," with the dual role of being a "steward of the Palm OS" and builder of a "broader Mobile Linux Ecosystem." They seem to have caught on pretty well to the Linux spirit of openness, releasing a new embedded Linux filesystem library that delivers POSIX-style semantics on top of SQLite, the popular open source database engine that ALP uses. Libsqlfs and other open source contributions by PalmSource are explained here.

Meantime, a la Mobile and Trolltech are trying to steal the spotlight with their own Linux phone announcements. And let's not forget the Linux standards bodies: OSDL is citing a Diffusion Group study that predicts Linux will surpass Symbian's share of the phone market within four years. Whew!

Wednesday I've been granted an interview with Dr Tomihisa Kamada, co-founder and CTO of ACCESS. Along with my impressions of the PalmSource Developer Day and ALP demo on the expo floor, I'll post my thoughts from the interview here and on PalmInfocenter.

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Don't forget to check out the 40th edition of Carnival of the Mobilists at Abiro this week. The best reading on mobility and a nice editorial job done by Anders Borg!

My curiosity got the best of me and I decided I will head out to San Francisco for the PalmSource Developer Day on Aug 16. If you're planning to attend and would like to meet up, drop me an email at dbeers at gmail dot com. If we get a group together to meet for dinner after the event I'll post more information about it here, so check back.

For you Palm developers who thought there wouldn't be a PalmSource DevCon this year (myself included) PalmSource has decided to prove us wrong. It's just a one-day event, but it actually sounds pretty good!

Here are the sessions:

Introduction to ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP). This is a hands-on session that will describe the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) and details its open source architecture. PalmSource will also demonstrate ALP and transform a typical Hello World application into an ALP application ready for mobile device deployment. Attendees will run sample applications as well as have the opportunity to build one together as a group.

Deep Dive into ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP). In this session PalmSource and attendees will take the ALP application from the Hands-On intro and add GUI controls with Glade, introduce special mobile device event handlers and show debugging an ALP application via Eclipse on the Simulator.

Compatibility Station. A unique and special experience for attendees, PalmSource will invite Palm OS developers to try their existing applications on ALP and discuss compatibility strategies with onsite PalmSource engineers.

Extending an ALP Application. In this final session PalmSource will add more features to the application from the Deep Dive Session, including accessing a SQLite database for information storage and retrieval. PalmSource will provide go-forward advice and guidance to help you plan and prepare your projects to support ALP.

All this is happening on Aug 16 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You don't have to register for the entire LinuxWorld conference--it's just $95 if you're not a LinuxWorld attendee.

Frankly, I'm flabbergasted. Delighted it's happening, sure. But why did I have to find out about this from a LinuxWorld press release instead of getting an email through PalmSource's developer program? Why didn't someone announce this on the Palm Entrepreneur's Forum (an oversite I am about to correct)? And why, oh why, is this being announced only three weeks before LinuxWorld? Did PalmSource think this would only be of interest to folks who already were planning to attend LinuxWorld? It's not even listed as news on the front page of their web site. You have to drill into it, and even then I couldn't find the above information about the sessions, only a registration link.

Scrambling to see if there is some way I can make it out to San Francisco on August 16....

Just as I was writing that PalmSource still has an opportunity to develop the first really complete Linux phone OS, this came in. Yet another mobile Linux platform competitor walks on to the field claiming "the industry's first 'complete' Linux-based smartphone operating system." Out of nowhere.

It's late and it's a "school night" so I'll update this post to give my impressions tomorrow.

Update: This Convergent Linux Platform from a start-up called a la Mobile is interesting for a couple of reasons. First is the fact that the company is so tiny compared to even its smallest competitors. They've got only 16 employees who have been working for a year, yet they're planning their first release in just three months. I'd love to know the details of how they pulled this together. They offer the same "quicker time-to-market" proposition that all the other mobile Linux vendors do, but marketing hype or not, it's clear that the mobile Linux ecosystem has been strong enough to do wonders for their time-to-market. While this software platform looks more like a feature phone than a smartphone, having no native third party application framework, it does inspire some confidence that Linux is gaining serious momentum in the mobile OS market--a lot more than the vaporous new consortium announcement of last week.

Another eye-catching feature of this platform is the proprietary hardware abstraction layer. Where vendors like PalmSource and TrollTech are trying to carve out their value-add in the upper layers of the software stack, a la Mobile is focusing on the bottom, where the kernel meets the metal. Described as a "BIOS for phones," its Hardware Mobility Engine will abstract from the peculiarities of XScale, OMAP, Freescale, or other ARM processors and present a uniform API to the kernel above it. The OS won't even need to be recompiled to run on different silicon.

I have to believe there is a cost to that kind of abstraction, though I don't pretend to understand enough about chip architectures to put my finger on it. But if a la Mobile can really maintain this binary compatibility over each new evolution of the leading processors I'd guess the handset manufacturers will see this as an attractive proposition.

How many separate standard-generating industry initiatives do we need to keep mobile Linux from fragmenting? If you believe LinuxDevices.com, maybe the fourth one is the charm. Otherwise you were probably shaking your head like I was when you heard that Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone (admittedly some heavyweights in the Linux handset world) have announced that they will share a similar mission as OSDL, CELF, and LiPS in trying to standardize Linux for mobile devices. The new fraternity has yet to announce a name.

So let's see... CELF's founding members include Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, and Panasonic. OSDL's Mobile Linux Initiative was founded by Montavista, Motorola, PalmSource, Trolltech, Wind River, NEC and NTT. And LiPS is comprised of ARM Ltd., Cellon, Esmertec, France Telecom/Orange, FSMLabs, Huawei, Jaluna, MIZI Research, MontaVista, Open Plug, and PalmSource. Most of the major players seem to want to be members of exactly two "standardizing" initiatives but none want to share their ball with all the rest.

The only thing I can see that makes this annoucement different from those we've heard from the previous three initiatives is that most of the companies involved this time actually have experience developing and selling Linux handsets and they claim they're not just going to devise abstract standards but to collaborate on developing a concrete open source implementation. That's significant, but as Michael Mace has pointed out, there's no indication just how far up the value line arch rivals like Motorola and Samsung will be willing to standardize their Linux platforms. Will they just develop a distro with kernel and low-level services or will they go so far as to standardize the application framework and user interface, too? Bill Weinberg of OSDL has pointed out that the higher you raise the value line--the part of the platform that is open source--the less differentiation (and less value add) can be achieved by handset vendors, making it hard for vendors to agree to standardize far up the software stack.

Call me jaded, but I think the very fact that these companies chose to create yet another standards body instead of throwing their weight behind one of the three that's already working on the problem is pretty good evidence that they're not really interested in a "universal Linux platform" at all. For that reason I'm skeptical that any Linux phone implementation they develop will result in a platform that will, say, enable the same native applications to run across handsets from any of the four device vendors. If they do, my hat will be the first one that's off to them and my enthusiasm for Linux as a viable challenger to Symbian's dominance will be renewed. But for now this looks to me like just one more sign that handset vendors aren't really sincere about joining forces to mount such a challenge.

Following the "we'll belong to two" pattern, ACCESS/PalmSource and MontaVista have decided not to join the new Linux clique (or perhaps weren't invited). I'm not sure what this means for MontaVista, but for PalmSource it seems like a mixed bag. It's bad news in as much as they need all the momentum behind mobile Linux they can get to make a splash when the ACCESS Linux Platform is released, and this sounds more likely to dissipate than generate that momentum. Ironically, this kind of factionalism may produce enough dithering and uncertainty in the development of a really open Linux platform that the first guys who come up with some good proprietary middleware to run on Linux will attract some decent clients. In that somewhat sad way PalmSource could wind up being a backhanded beneficiary, especially if they can do their magic on the user interface. The high-level stuff is where a consortium like this one will deliver the weakest thrust, and that's exactly where a successful Linux phone platform will have to be the strongest.

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